About — in the speaker's own words
I'm the Co-Founder of pi_optimal, where we're working to democratize reinforcement learning and make it usable for real-world decision-making. My passion lies in building AI systems that don't just work in theory, but actually solve meaningful problems in practice.
Before that, I was Lead Data Scientist at Stellwerk3 GmbH, where I led the development of a model-based reinforcement learning project for campaign control. I also had the chance to represent the company at Cyber Valley Incubator events and build a strong, collaborative data team.
My academic journey brought me to the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, where I focused on challenges in autonomous learning — from sparse rewards in model-free RL to structured world models and graph networks in model-based approaches. Earlier on, I also worked in digital advertising technology at Gruner + Jahr, developing deep learning models for ad click prediction.
Across all these experiences, one thing has stayed the same: I love taking complex machine learning concepts and turning them into impactful, real-world applications.