Mini CV

Born in Germany into a protestant-lutheran family, nurtered with a mix of enlightened philosophy, I later became an atheist for moral reasons, only to become agnostic, then existentialist, finally a romantic pragmatist. I am a shy extrovert with a disposition towards generalizations. Politically, many of my opinions can be categorized as environmentalist. Philosophically, I see myself as a skeptical instrumentalist.

Highly random particle processes converged on my decision for Cognitive Science in Osnabrück, what I attributed within a close time window to my dispersed interests in artificial intelligence, linguistics, psychology and "brain stuff." Frequent entropy changes further brought me to the New Bulgarian University in Sofia, the Middle East Technical University in Ankara and the Chuo University in Tokyo. I had the chance to do my thesis with Peter König, who suggested to me a work about monkeys' visual preferences. I immersed myself in a distributed network of matlab scripts from which emerged a work which I reluctantly but proudly and finally ended and handed in the last open day of the examination office as my graduation thesis, before I went to Barcelona for studying Artificial Intelligence in the newly created master programme there. My thesis entitled "Investigations Into Differences of Monkey And Human Eye Movements" compared eye tracking data of rhesus macaque and humans viewing the same set of images with respect to basic eye movement properties. I looked at eye movements, such as saccade speed, saccade length, fixation duration, saccade duration and tried to attribute them to influences of image features, such as luminance contrast, texture contrast, and orientation of lines within patches. I looked at disparity of fixation locations, feature-influences and eye movements and at the time courses of these eye movements, feature influences and the disparities thereof.

See my homepage for more details.

Benjamin

27th November, 2006