Profile

Computational perception of audiovisual media (e.g. face recognition, speech recognition, speaker recognition), forensic application of biometric media understanding technology, development of methods and processes in the area of big data analysis (summarization, statistical filtering, machine learning & classification including deep learning), development of multimedia and mixed reality applications (in particular, of hybrid systems), and analysis of software quality and usability of large software projects and web-based systems.

Office hours

I am part-time at TU Wien. Please contact me by e-mail. How to find my office (room HG0401): Enter Favoritenstrasse 11, go to stair 3, ascend to the fourth floor, take the first aisle on the right, once inside you stand right in front of my office.

PhD Thesis Topics

Forensic Biometrics. As an expert witness for forensic person recognition in Austria and at the International Criminal Court in The Hague I work with state of the art methods for face recognition, person recognition and speech recognition in order to identify subjects wanted in connection with criminal events. In this context I am looking for a PhD student who would like to conduct research in relevant areas of forensic biometrics, e.g. gait analysis, (semi-)automatic generation of speech corpora in relevant languages, etc.

Hybrid System Design. In the context of the Virtual Reality projects Virtual Jumpcube and Vreeclimber we have developed hybrid systems with a large number of non-standard stimulation devices in the areas of touch, smell and even taste. These installations have been heavily used at exhibitions and have frequently been evaluated with large numbers of users. Based on these data and the given systems, I am looking for a PhD student who would be willing to perform additional experiments and publish the findings in systematic fashion, e.g. in the context of HCI, virtual reality systems or hybrid multimedia applications.

Strategy Game Modelling. In courses at the Faculty of Informatics at TU Wien we have developed various environments for the implementation of intelligent agents for playing strategy games. Based on these environments students have suggested various approaches for reinforcement learning based algorithms that are able to solve complex strategic learning problems. As a result, we have a rich ground of available material for a PhD student who would like to conduct her/his research in the area of strategic planning, either in a gaming context or otherwise.

Note: Please be aware that at the moment we have no scientific funding for these PhD project. However, there exists the possibility to combine the PhD project with practical software engineering work in a part-time occupation at TU Wien. If you are interested, please send me an email.

More Information & Links

Current Project: Vree Runner

The Vree Runner project uses the existing infrastructure of the Virtual Jumpcube project and implements a virtual reality application for house running down St. Stephen’s Cathedral in downtown Vienna that includes haptic stimuli such as an earthquake and wind. In the future, spray & heat will be added as well as olfactory stimuli + more scenarios (e.g. walking down a crater on the Moon).

Current Project: Vreeclimber

The Vreeclimber project combines virtual reality and complex multimedia with a physical rotating climbing wall thus creating a globally unique hybrid system that, for examples, enables the user to experience rock climbing on the moon, St. Stephen’s cathedral or in free space. Please contact me if you would like to contribute to this project.

Projects

Available topics

Courses (2024S)

Publications