Welcome! I am an Assistand Professor building the new "Intelligent Sensing and Perception" group at the University of Stuttgart. I am also a faculty member of the International Max Planck Research School for Intelligent Systems (IMPRS-IS). My research is dedicated to advancing deep learning methods for data-efficient, uncertainty-aware and privacy-preserving perception of humans to solve impactful problems in autonomous driving, assistive systems and robotics.

About Me

Research

With the accuracy of CNNs gradually reaching the ceiling, the existing gap between the published methods and their applications in practice makes us wonder about important performance aspects being overlooked. In my research, I aim to go beyond the traditional goal of high top-1 accuracy on a static carefully designed classes, and develop human activity recognition models which do not only (1) assign the correct category, but also (2) reliably identify incorrect predictions and unknown situations and (3) trace back their causes of failure, and (4) have tools for dealing with new concepts-of-interest without costly labelling. I am especially interested in developing algorithms to solve impactful problems in challenging open-world applications, such as autonomous driving and robotics. My main research topics are:

  • Computer Vision for Intelligent Vehicles and Robotics
  • Human Activity Recognition, Driver Monitoring
  • Interpretable and Uncertainty-aware Visual Recognition
  • Open Set and Open Domain Recognition
  • Data-efficient Recognition, Zero- and Few-Shot-Learning
  • Computer Vision for Health Monitoring, Physiological Analysis and Medical Diagnostics

Short CV

  • Since August 2023: Faculty member of the International Max Planck Research School for Intelligent Systems (IMPRS-IS).
  • Since June 2023: Tenure-Track Assistant Professor - Autonomous Sensing and Perception Group, University of Stuttgart.
  • April 2023 - May 2023: Visiting Researcher - Chair for Sustainable Transport Logistics 4.0, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria.
  • April 2021 - May 2023: Postdoctoral Researcher - Lead of the Activity Recognition Group at CV:HCI.
  • PhD at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (summa cum laude), April 2017 - April 2021. Topic: "Uncertainty-aware Models for Deep Learning-based Human Activity Recognition and Applications in Intelligent Vehicles." Referents: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Rainer Stiefelhagen (KIT, IAR) und Prof. Dr. Mohan Trivedi (University of San Diego). The manuscript is available here. IEEE ITSS Best Dissertation Award 2021 (second prize).
  • PhD internship at Facebook Zurich - Computer Vision for AR/VR, September 2020 - November```html 2020.
  • Consultant at MHP - A Porsche Company, Big Data & Analytics, 2016 - 2017.
  • M.Sc. in Computer Science at Technical University Munich, 2013 - 2015.
  • Student Assistant at fortiss GmbH, developing human-robot-interfaces for industrial robotics, 2014 - 2015.
  • Erasmus studies at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden, 2012 - 2013.
  • B.Sc. in Computer Science at Technical University Munich, 2009 - 2012.

Scholarships & Awards

  • Elite program for PostDocs of the BW Fondation (accepted for the year 2023) - Baden-Württemberg Fondation, Dec 2022.
  • Best Dissertation Award (first prize) - IEEE ITSS Germany PhD Dissertation Award, June 2022.
  • Best Dissertation Prize - KIT Faculty of Computer Science, donated by the Erika and Dr. Wolfgang Eichelberger Foundation, June 2022.
  • Helmholtz Doctoral Award - yearly Helmholtz Doctoral Prize for mission-oriented research in the field "Information", Apr 2022.
  • KIT Doctoral Award - yearly prize awarded by KIT to outstanding doctoral researchers, Dec 2021.
  • Best Dissertation Award 2021 (second prize) - IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society (ITSS), Sep 2021.
  • Best Student Paper First Runner Up Award - Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (Awarded Paper: "Open Set Driver Activity Recognition"), Jan 2020.
  • ECCV Women in Computer Vision Travel Grant awarded for the presentation "Towards Human Activity Recognition in Autonomous Vehicles", 2018.
  • Deutschlandstipendium - German national scholarship for talented students, 2014.
  • Google Summer of Code, a programming scholarship awarded by Google to support students working on open-source software (project: Point Cloud Library), 2014.
  • School-time - three awards for the second and one award for the third place in the Ukrainian Mathematical Olympiadas (7th and 8th grade).