Benjamin is a senior research and development engineer with 14 years of work experience, specialized in early technology adoption and disruptive, user-centric prototype development. He combines strong user empathy and profound technology understanding, e.g., in the field of deep learning, with creativity and a sense for business opportunities. He has a proven ability to manage multiple projects, strict deadlines, and short-term changes with ease, and routinely discusses and presents findings to top managers and C-level executives.
Work Experience
AUDI AG & CARIAD SE
July 2005 – December 2022
Senior Research and Development Engineer
Early prototype development of smart mobility experiences, e.g., cars that completely adapt to the user and anticipate the users’ wishes and desires. I worked on multimodal interaction concepts, intelligent system/software architectures and underlying machine learning/deep learning algorithms. My innovations are included in Audi smart phone applications, next-gen vehicle infotainment units, and numerous other functions and services.
Selected Projects:
University of Oldenburg
January 2014 – October 2014
HCI Researcher and Development Engineer
During the final phase of my PhD research, I took over postdoc responsibilities and academic management duties. I initiated the acquisition of new research projects, guided junior PhD researchers, lectured a course on human-computer interaction fundamentals, and participated in several local and EU-wide research initiatives.
Selected Projects:
OFFIS – Institute for Information Technology
April 2009 – December 2013
HCI Researcher and Development Engineer
I worked on numerous regional, national, and international projects of various funding schemes (EU flagship initiatives and industry funding). Most notably, I took over coordination and lead-development activities in the successful EU project NavMem (http://www.navmem.eu/, AAL-2011-4-122), and was responsible for several of the key artifacts that were released in the HaptiMap project (http://www.haptimap.org/, FP7-ICT-224675).
Selected Projects:
Education
Doktor der Ingenieurwissenschaften
April 2009 – July 2014
My PhD thesis is titled Sensor-supported, Unsupervised Observation Techniques for Field Studies and presents a set of unobtrusive field observation techniques. Find an abstract and the full document here.
Diplom Informatiker
October 2004 – November 2008
My diploma thesis is about the Tacticycle, a bicycle which encourages the exploration of unknown environments. Two vibration actuators in the handle bar present the direction to a set destination and highlight nearby points of interest. I further created wiigee during my undergraduate studies, which is a library for 3D gesture recognition.
