Bio

  • Jan. 2025 — today: (tenured) Associate Professor at the ANU.
    (US-equivalent: Full Professor, German equivalent: Professor (rank W3)*)
  • Jan. 2022 — today: (tenure-track) Senior Lecturer at the ANU.
    (US-equivalent: Associate Professor, German equivalent: Professor (rank W2)*)
  • Nov. 2019 — Dec. 2021: (tenure-track) Lecturer at the ANU.
    (US-equivalent: Assistant Professor, German equivalent: Junior-Professor (rank W1)*)
  • Oct. 2016 — Oct. 2019: Project coordinator over the entire runtime of the technology transfer project Do it yourself, but not alone: Companion-Technology for Home Improvement, which was a collaboration between two Institutes of Ulm University and the Corporate Research Sector of Robert Bosch GmbH.
  • July 2009 — Dec. 2017: Dr. rer. nat. at the Institute of Artificial Intelligence of Ulm University, Germany. My supervisor was Prof. Dr. Susanne Biundo-Stephan.
  • Oct. 2003 — June 2009: Studies of Computer Science (German "Diplom", which is roughly Bachelor + Master in a single degree) at the University of Freiburg, Germany.

For my various service roles undertaken at the ANU (or Ulm University), visit the respective page.

*: On the different Professor ranks: The attentive reader might have noticed that I claim that the Associate Professor in Australia is equivalent to the Full Professor in the US or that in Germany (W3). That might appear odd as those are the highest ranks in these countries, but "Associate Professor" clearly isn't. How's that possible? "Easy": Australia has 4 ranks, whereas most other countries have only 3, so naturally there is no clear 1-to-1 mapping.
The Full Professor in Australia is less frequent than the Full Professor in the US or Germany. In other words, whereas that rank is "the default" after the initial first few years especially in Germany (for example), not everybody in Australia even gets it, and even those who do, often get it deep in their 50s. Further, the achievements required to get the rank of an Associate Professor in Australia are comparable with those required to become a Full Professor in the rest of the world. The requirements for being promoted to a Full Professor in Australia on the other hand is much more challenging, and hence the reason why not every academic even aims at this rank, or otherwise often gets it comparably late in their career. There's (even!) more that could be said but the explanation is already too long anyway. ;) I hope it helped!

*: On tenure vs. tenure-track: Tenure means that one has an ongoing contract, i.e., has permanent position. If one is not tenured, one has a fixed-term contract that ends after a few years. Being on "tenure-track" means that one is in a special program where the evaluation to obtain tenure (or get it declined) is already agreed upon. I.e., being on tenture-track means that there will be an evaluation in a few years (of which the expectation is that one gets tenure, but that depends on the evaluation outcome). At the ANU, getting tenure is independent of being promoted. In fact, my promotion to Associate Professor was announced in October 2024 already (and become active on January 1st, 2025), whereas tenure was announced in the middle of January 2025 only (and was a separate process, i.e., a different application and evaluation process by different committees).