Curriculum Vitae
"AI is emergent and will surpass human intelligence in at most two years."
Current Position
2023 – present
Head, Competence Centre for Generative AI
DFKI – German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Berlin
Leading DFKI's cross-departmental centre for Generative AI research. Responsible for consolidating research results, building AI literacy programmes, and advising businesses, educational institutions, and policymakers on responsible AI transformation.
2017 – present
Associate Head & Chief Engineer, Language Technology Lab Berlin
DFKI – German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Berlin
Deputy Head of the Language Technology department, overseeing more than 30 researchers, engineers, and consultants. Leading applied and fundamental research in NLP, Machine Learning, and Big Data. Successfully managed more than 20 national and international R&D projects.
Industry & Entrepreneurship
2023 – present
Co-Founder
AI Transformation Institute (aiti.ai) – DFKI Spin-off, Berlin
Knowledge transfer and consulting spin-off bridging DFKI research and industry. Provides AI training programmes and strategic advice for companies undergoing AI transformation.
2018 – 2023
Co-Founder
Giance Technologies GmbH (now part of unicepta), Berlin/China
China-Germany based AI company, later acquired by unicepta.
2007 – 2018
Co-Founder & CTO
Yocoy GmbH, Berlin
Founded with Prof. Hans Uszkoreit and Dr. Feiyu Xu. Developed more than 30 cross-lingual mobile apps for tourism and language learning. Acquired by AITC Ltd. (Beijing) in April 2018.
2000 – 2005
Co-Founder & Head of Research
XtraMind Technologies GmbH (now Sematell GmbH)
DFKI spin-off focused on intelligent customer contact centre solutions powered by NLP.
Research at DFKI
2007 – 2017
Chief Engineer
DFKI Language Technology Lab, Berlin
Led research and industrial projects in NLP, Machine Learning, exploratory search, and mobile applications. Re-joined DFKI after the Yocoy and XtraMind ventures.
1998 – 2000
Researcher & Software Developer
DFKI, Saarbrücken
Early career work on NLP systems and intelligent information retrieval.
Education
PhD
Dr. rer. nat. – Computational Linguistics
Technische Universität Berlin
Dissertation: Exploratory Search on Mobile Devices
1989 – 1997
Diplom (MSc) – Computer Science & Physics
Saarland University, Saarbrücken
Major in Computer Science with a focus on language technology and physics.
Teaching
ongoing
Lecturer – Data Mining & Information Retrieval
TU Berlin · Saarland University · DHBW Stuttgart · DHBW Heilbronn
Regular courses on data mining, machine learning, and NLP at bachelor and master level.
2023
Course Author – KI & Leadership
KI Campus (ki-campus.org)
Developed and published an online course on AI leadership for the German national AI learning platform.
Patents & Awards
2004
Patent: Automatic Text Classification Method
Deutsches Patentamt, Patent No. 10210553
Verfahren zum automatischen Klassifizieren eines Textes durch ein Computersystem – a method for automatically classifying a text by a computer system.
Research Interests
Natural Language Processing · Generative AI & Large Language Models ·
Machine Learning · Spoken Dialogue Systems ·
Information Extraction & Event Detection ·
Semantic Search & Information Retrieval ·
Big Data Analytics · Mobile NLP Applications ·
Machine Translation Quality Estimation · Human-Computer Interaction