I was born and raised in the heart of Germany and grew up a very outgoing and active child. I now live in Canada. I studied Computer Science and Physics at the Free University of Berlin.
In my research, one important thing I do is develop the C++ machine learning library mlpack, which contains a growing collection of high-quality implementations of cutting-edge machine learning algorithms and is in use by both researchers and industry groups worldwide. I also work on ensmallen—a flexible library for efficient mathematical optimization, which provides a simple set of abstractions for writing an objective function to optimize. It also provides a large set of standard and cutting-edge optimizers that can be used for virtually any mathematical optimization task. I also work on speech-focused projects, including WhisperLive (real-time speech recognition and streaming inference) and WhisperSpeech (open-source speech and TTS research).
I also contribute to bandicoot, a GPU linear algebra library for C++ that targets a balance of speed and ease of use.
In short, my research interests include (modular/hierarchical) reinforcement learning, (stochastic/black-box) optimization and (deep/recurrent) neural networks. I have used these techniques in application domains ranging from computer vision and neural decoding to localization and robotics.