Summary

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

Google logo

Google

January 2023 – now

Quantitative UX Researcher

I help the Technical Infrastructure (TI) team to meet the reliability expectations and scalability demands of Google’s flagship products (YouTube, Search, etc.) and Google Cloud customers. My strategic, data-driven research streamlines the production landscape and increases the efficiency of users in a diverse set of products and services. Additionally, I explore, demonstrate, and evaluate how the newest AI breakthroughs, such as Large Language Models (LLM) or Generative AI, can be applied to systematically optimize the user experiences.


AUDI AG & CARIAD SE

July 2015 – 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.