Bremen (DE)

About

I am a research associate at the Digital Media Lab at the University of Bremen. My work at the collaborative research center “Everyday Activity Science and Engineering” focuses on semantic disambiguation for robots using image schemas and mental simulation. In my free time, I build small open source projects and sometimes contribute to bigger ones.

Experience

University of Bremen

–
Research Associate

Embodied simulations for natural language understanding.

  • Member of the collaborative research center “EASE”.

Osnabrück University

–
Tutor/Lecturer

Teaching “Basic Programming in Python”

  • Evaluation in many categories in the top 10%.

Osnabrück University

–
Tutor

Tutor for Machine Learning and Computer Vision.

Level Up Analytics GmbH

–
Part time Data Engineer Intern

Data pipelining and backend development for Wasabi.

  • Introduced data format versioning.

Intuit Inc.

–
Data Engineer Intern

Docker setup for Wasabi on Windows.

  • Bookmarking feature for Wasabi.
  • Internal teaser presentation on machine learning.

Intuit Inc.

–
Data Engineer Intern

Backend development for Wasabi, an open source A/B testing SaaS platform.

  • Added a flexible audit log system

Education

Osnabrück University

–
Cognitive Science
Master of Science
GPA: 1.1 (with distinction)
  • Machine Learning
  • Computational Linguistics
  • Thesis: Gaze Tracking Using Common Webcams

Osnabrück University

–
Computer Science
Master of Science (discontinued)
GPA: n/a
  • AI & Robotics
  • Uncertainty Treatment in Automation Engineering
  • E-Learning

Osnabrück University

–
Cognitive Science
Bachelor of Science
GPA: 1.9
  • Computer Graphics
  • Computer Vision
  • Thesis: Probabilistic Robot Localization in Continuous 3D Maps

Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi

–
Computer Engineering
Erasmus Exchange
GPA: 1.25 (converted)
  • Computer Animation
  • Robot Motion Planning and Control
  • Database Management Systems

Städtisches Gymnasium Sundern

–
Allgemeine Hochschulreife (Abitur)
High School
GPA: 1.8
  • Mathematics
  • Chemistry

Publications

D. Beßler, R. Porzel, M. Pomarlan, A. Vyas, S. Höffner, M. Beetz, R. Malaka, J. Bateman: Foundations of the Socio-physical Model of Activities (SOMA) for Autonomous Robotic Agents. FOIS 2021

https://fois2021.inf.unibz.it/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/paper_13.pdf

D. Alexandrovsky, S. Putze, M. Bonfert, S. Höffner, P. Michelmann, D. Wenig, R. Malaka, J. D. Smeddinck: Examining Design Choices of Questionnaires in VR User Studies. CHI '20, ACM

doi:10.1145/3313831.3376260

S. Putze, D. Alexandrovsky, F. Putze, S. Höffner, J. D. Smeddinck, R. Malaka: Breaking The Experience: Effects of Questionnaires in VR User Studies. CHI '20, ACM

doi:10.1145/3313831.3376144

J. Pfau, R. Porzel, M. Pomarlan, V. S. Cangalovic, S. Grudpan, S. Höffner, J. Bateman, R. Malaka: Give MEANinGS to Robots with Kitchen Clash: A VR Human Computation Serious Game for World Knowledge Accumulation. ICEC-JCSG 2019, Springer

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-34644-7_7

Volunteer

Inside (school magazine)

–
Co-Founder, Art Editor, Editor
http://d-nb.info/998514713

Layout and editing of articles, organizing team meetings.

  • Increased initial circulation from 200 to 500, effectively reaching every second student.

Projects

cvloop

–
Tutor at Biologically oriented Computer Vision group

Tool for video stream manipulation in Jupyter notebooks.

https://github.com/shoeffner/cvloop

Wasabi

–
Internship at Intuit Data Engineering and Analytics

Software as a service platform to perform platform agnostic A/B testing using a REST API.

https://github.com/intuit/wasabi

Machine Learning Exercise Sheets

–
Tutor at Biologically oriented Computer Vision group

Homework sheets for the machine learning class at Osnabrück University.

https://github.com/CogSciUOS/MachineLearningSheets

Awards

Schülerzeitungspreis 2011: Sonderpreis Crossmedial
Bundesverband Deutscher Zeitungsverleger (BDZV)
Awarded for the Inside magazine for combining print and online media.
2nd Place “WoRtWiTz”
MHMK, Hochschule für Medien und Kommunikation
Awarded for the Inside magazine with praise especially of the professional layout and high quality articles.

Skills

Programming
  • Python (8+ years)
  • C# (3+ years)
  • LaTeX (11+ years)
  • Java (5+ years)
  • C++ (3 years)
  • Matlab (2 years)
  • HTML/CSS (13+ years)
  • R, Prolog, JavaScript, PHP
Software development & tooling
  • git (9+ years)
  • Docker (4+ years)
  • bash (10+ years)
  • GNU Make (6+ years)
  • Github Actions, Gitlab CI, Travis
  • macOS/Linux/Windows (6/10/17+ years)
Frameworks & Libraries
  • TensorFlow/Keras/Pytorch (4/2/1+ years)
  • numpy/scipy/scikit-learn (8+ years)
  • matplotlib (8+ years)
  • SteamVR, OpenCV, dlib, OpenGL, Spark
Database systems & languages
  • SQLite, MySQL/MariaDB, Cassandra, SPARQL, Fuseki
Other
  • ROS (1+ years)
  • pandoc (5+ years)
  • Raspberry Pi, Arduino, esp8266
  • Unity3D (3+ years)
  • 3D printing (1+ years)
  • AWS, Azure, self-hosted
  • home-assistant

Languages

German
Native speaker
English
Fluent