Mikio L. Braun
Fascinated with AI since 1993
Mikio L. Braun
Independent Consultant and Freelancer
Brief Resumé
I received pre-diplomas (~B.Sc.) in Mathematics and Computer Science and a diploma (~M.Sc.) in Computer Science from the University of Bonn. From 2000 to 2004, I was a research assistant and Ph.D. student in the CVPR group headed by Prof. Buhmann at the University of Bonn. In May 2004, I have joined the Intelligent Data Analysis Group headed by Klaus-Robert Müller at the Fraunhofer Institute FIRST in Berlin, Germany. In January 2007, I moved to the Technical University of Berlin branch of the IDA Group. In 2010, I co-founded TWIMPACT, a start-up company focused on real-time analysis of social media data. In 2015, I quite academia and TWIMPACT and joined Zalando as a Deliver Lead for the Recommendation and Search teams, later switched to an individual contributor role. In 2020 I joined GetYourGuide as a Staff Data Scientists. Since October 2020, I am working as an independent consultant and freelancer.Research Interests
Current Interests
- Putting machine learning in production
- Search Relevance
- Large scale data processing
- Successful data science projects
- Data product teams and organizations
- Building data teams
- Data strategy and creating data driven products
Past Research Interests
- social media analysis, data science
- reinforcement learning, adaptive control
- machine learning, statistical learning theory
- kernel methods
- feature extraction
- machine learning for multimedia data
- clustering, stability based model selection
- approximation theory for eigenvalues and eigenvectors
- programming languages for machine learning
- some bioinformatics, brain-computer interface
"Political" Interests
- open source software for machine learning
- interoperatibility of ML software
- reproducibility of ML research
Projects
Here is a short list of the projects I've already worked on. ("Worked on" means that I was paid by these projects, and/or was responsible for the part of the project of the respective institution.)University of Bonn (1995-2004)
- Retina Implant project Building an adaptive neuronal implant for people suffering from retinitis pigmentosa, a disease which ultimately leads to blindness.
- emilea e-stat A project aimed at building an environment for e-learning. The university of Bonn was a content-provider for machine learning.
- Teaching duties.
Fraunhofer Institute FIRST (2004-2007)
- A project together with Daimler-Chrysler to measure the amount of mental workload of a car driver using EEG.
- ADDnet Finding new methods for detecting proteinurea in an early stage using bioinformatics. This was an EU project headed by the University of Helsinki
- FaSor An extension of the earlier project with Daimler-Chrysler. The goal is to interpret the driver as a sensory system.
- THESEUS A large project funded by the Bundeswirtschaftsministerium. I was responsible for designing the part of Fraunhofer FIRST. Our task will be to automatically extract semantic annotation for images.
Technical Universtiy of Berlin (2007-2019)
Technically, my position is paid for by the university (Haushaltsstelle), so I'm not on the payroll of any specific project.
- Teaching duties.
- A bit of system administration.
- ALICE - Autonomous learning in complex environments. Joint project with Siemens and idalab GmbH with applications to wind turbine control.
TWIMPACT/streamdrill (2010-2014)
TWIMPACT, later streamdrill, was my start-up-on-the-side. It was concerned with real-time social media stream analysis.
Fedistats (2023-)
Fedistats is a news aggregation and trend analysis project based on Mastodon.