(Reposted from my blog. Originally posted on margint.blog on Dec 25, 2017) Two and a half-years ago I jumped of the AI bandwagon, left a permanent position in academia to joined “the industry,” namely Zalando, a big European fashion ecommerce retailer. On the other hand, ever since I left, AI…

I actually come from a musical family. My mother and father both studied music, my father being a professor in Mannheim, and my mother working as a piano teacher up to retirement. I got my first teaching lessons from my mother, but she handed me over to a colleague because…

If everybody is excited why tell them? — To be honest, I always hated the way scientists were portrayed in works like the MIT Technology Review. Invariably, the article was written as if the author managed to sneak in the secret lair and got a first hand account of how science gets made. …

20 Years of Machine Learning — When I enrolled in Computer Science in 1995, Data Science didn’t exist yet, but a lot of the algorithms we are still using already did. And this is not just because of the return of the neural networks, but also because probably not that much has fundamentally changed since back…

Me & Academia, Part I — The main reason I started with science was that I wanted to get to the fringe of what we know at least in one area. I wanted to get there, have a look at the uncharted land ahead and see what that feels like. …

How the NSA helps bringing us closer to extinction — Anyone still remember the 1984 movie “The Terminator”? The computer system Skynet, developed for the U.S. military, is giving full control over all computerized weapon systems in order to reduce the possibility of human error, and subsequently gains self-awareness. …