Teaching

My main teaching revolves around Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in different formats and for different audiences. I was awarded a final round nomination for the “Best Teaching - Best Practices” award of my university in 2017 for my contribution under the topic “Wissenschaftlichkeit” (scientific character), and won it (3rd place) in 2019 for the “Vermittlung von Grundlagen” (teaching of foundational matters). My shorter teaching statement from 2008 is still valid: “I love teaching. To initiate inside someone the vision of an idea, to see understanding grow, these are moments I greatly enjoy.”

TOC

  1. Online courses (direct link to video lectures: AI 2018 & ML 2019)
  2. Supervised thesis projects (all levels)
  3. Lectures & curriculae

Classroom

Online courses

Original versions of my main courses are available as free online ressources as a best effort offer.

  • Artificial Intelligence 2018 (KI1): final year elective course in the Bachelor of Computer Science degree program of ZHAW. Available online with full course material, videos and audio-only recordings. Taught in German, material in English.
  • Machine Learning 2019 (TSM_MachLe): elective technical scientific specialization module on the Master of Science in Engineering program, focus area ICT / Data Science. Material & lectures in English.

Supervised thesis projects (all levels)

When Level Type Title
Fall 2024 PhD Thesis Strategies for Practical Deep Learning
top grade
student: Lukas Tuggener
Fall 2024 PhD Thesis Advanced Representation Learning Techniques For Graph Neural Networks
Fall 2024 BSc PA AI-based interpretation of engineering drawings
Fall 2024 BSc PA Enhancing SwissGPT with Agentic RAG
Spring 2024 MSc VT1 Overcoming Sample Scarcity and Label Ambiguity in Cell Segmentation and Classification of Thyroid Cancer: A Kernel-Based Approach on Top of CellSAM
Spring 2024 BSc BA Prosodic Feature Modelling in Transformers for Speaker Verification
follow-up research internship
Students: Fabian Bosshard, Andrin Fassbind
Spring 2024 BSc BA A2C2 - Natural Language-Instructed Autonomous Agent for Computer Control
Spring 2024 MAS Thesis Beaker detection using realtime image analysis and artificial neural networks
Fall 2023 PhD Thesis Deep Learning for Robust and Explainable Models in Computer Vision
Fall 2023 MSc MT Predicting DARPin Protein Binding using Geometric Graph Neural Networks
Spring 2023 MSc MT Self-Organisation in a Biologically Inspired Learning Framework Based on Bernoulli Neurons
top grade, paper
Student: Pascal Sager
Spring 2023 BSc BA RoboDog III: Building a Vision and /or Sound-Based AI Demonstrator on a Robotic Platform
top grade
Students: Juri Pfammatter, Daniel Schweizer
Spring 2023 BSc BA Deep-Learning-based Cell Segmentation for the Detection of Thyroid Cancer in Single Cells
top grade, Regional Siemens Excellence Award, Lab Sciences Award 2024, National Siemens Excellence Award, Publikumspreis, ZHAW SGD Award, 3rd. prize, paper
Students: Tenzin Samdrup Langdun, Martin Oswald
Spring 2023 BSc BA Teaching Neural Nets to Learn Dynamic Voice Features for Automatic Speaker Verification
Spring 2023 MAS Thesis Lean Production Monitoring (with Cameras)
Fall 2022 MSc VT2 Supporting DARPin binder selection through deep learning
Fall 2022 MSc VT1 Reproducing a large-scale Speaker Verification System
Fall 2022 MSc VT1 The Practical Impact of Data-Centrism on the Example of Autonomous Driving
Fall 2022 BSc PA RoboDog II: Building a Vision and /or Sound-Based AI Demonstrator on a Robotic Platform
top grade
Students: Tenzin Samdrup Langdun, Martin Oswald
Fall 2022 BSc PA Speak your mind! Brain Computer Interfaces for Communication
Fall 2022 BSc PA Machine-Learning-based Analysis of Data from the ZHAW Movement Analysis Laboratory for Fatigue Detection during Sports Exercises
Spring 2022 MSc MT Leveraging Neuroscience for Deep Learning Based Object Recognition
Spring 2022 MSc VT1 Automatic extraction of anthropometric features and body composition parameters from computer tomography images enables improved BMI prediction at scale
Spring 2022 BSc BA Making AI Tangible: Building a Computer Vision Demonstrator on a Robotic Platform
Spring 2022 BSc BA Learning to Learn: Learning Successful Weight Patterns for Instant Deep Neural Network Training
top grade
Students: Urban Lutz and Alexandre Manai
Fall 2022 MSc MT Entropy-Aware Active Vision through Voxelized Octree Exploration of 3D Scenes
Fall 2021 MAS Thesis Similarity Analysis of Jazz Tunes with Vector Space Models
Fall 2021 MAS Thesis Confidence-Rated Predictions with Deep Learning for Music Object Detection
Fall 2021 MSc VT2 End-to-End Pipeline for Body Composition Analysis and Sarcopenia Detection without Target Labels
top grade, paper
Student: Pascal Sager
Fall 2021 BSc PA Universal Songbook: Real Time Chord Prediction from Live Audio
Fall 2021 BSc PA Forschungs-PA: Continual Deep Learning for Visual Recognition
Spring 2021 MSc VT1 Exploiting Temporal Information in Speech using Deep Learning
Spring 2021 MSc VT2 Multimedia Retrieval using Vision Transformers
Spring 2021 MSc MT @ HSLU Deep Learning with Noisy Image Labels in Real-World Computer Vision Applications
_paper at SDS2021>
Student: Niclas Simmler
Spring 2021 BSc BA Neural Network-based Image Synthesis to Improve Automatic Segmentation of Medical Images for COVID
paper at CISP-BMEI 2021
Students: Jonathan Gruss and Yves D. Stebler
Spring 2021 BSc BA Transfer Learning of Deep Neural Network Representations of Brain Activity
top grade
Students: Benjamin Bertalan and Gian Andri Hess
Fall 2020 PhD Thesis @ Ca’Foscari / Venice external examiner for “Using Contextual Information In Weakly Supervised Learning”
Fall 2020 BSc PA From human to artificial neural networks: Deep-learning based analysis of brain activity
Spring 2020 MSc MT Exploiting the Full Information of Varying-Length Utterances for DNN-Based Speaker Verification
Spring 2020 BSc BA Active Scene Understanding from Image Sequences for Next-Generation Computer Vision
top grade, paper at AVHRC 2020, and Dr. Waldemar Jucker award 2020
Students: Dano Roost and Ralph Meier
Spring 2020 MAS Thesis Neural-network-based Speaker Diarization on Federal Assembly Sessions
Spring 2020 MSc MT @ EPFL Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Common Pool Resource Appropriation
top grade
Student: Zeki Doruk Erden
Spring 2020 PhD Thesis Exploiting Contextual Information with Deep Neural Networks
successfully defended
Candidate: Ismail Elezi
Fall 2019 MSc MT Medical Image Analysis using Deep Learning
Fall 2019 MSc VT2 WaveVoice: A Wavenet Based Architecture for Speaker Verification
Fall 2019 MSc VT1 Real-World Speaker Recognition on VoxCeleb2 using Angular Margin Losses
top grade
Student: Claude Lehmann
Fall 2019 BSc PA Reinforcement Learning mit einem Multi-Agenten System für die Planung von Zügen
paper at SDS 2020
Students: Dano Roost and Ralph Meier
Spring 2019 MSc VT2 Baselines for the Flatland Reinforcement Learning for Train Scheduling Challenge
Spring 2019 MSc VT1 Additive Angular Margin Loss for Speaker Clustering
Spring 2019 BSc BA Benchmarking of Classical and Deep Learning Speaker Clustering Approaches
Spring 2019 BSc BA Speaker Clustering for Real-World Data using Deep Learning
Fall 2018 MSc VT1 Deep Learning-based Classification of Musculoskeletal Radiographs - Learn to Zoom from Network Response
Fall 2018 BSc PA Speaker Recognition & Diarization on Realistic Data
Fall 2018 BSc PA Reinforcement Learning Challenge: Compete in Automatic Game Playing for e.g. Doom or Bomberman
Fall 2018 BSc PA Machine Learning to Support Artists
Spring 2018 BSc BA Recognizing birds by voice - the BirdCLEF 2018 challenge
Spring 2018 BSc BA Speaker Diarization of Media Archives with Deep Neural Networks
Spring 2018 BSc BA PinballWizard II: Using Reinforcement Learning to Control a Pinball Automaton
top grade
Students: Joram Liebeskind and Silvan Wehner
Spring 2018 BSc BA Understanding Deep Neural Networks
Fall 2017 BSc PA Are final grades predictable from resume photos? Debugging deep neural networks based on a controversial claim
Fall 2017 BSc PA Deep Learning Verfahren das Malen beibringen: Optimiertes Training für GANs
Fall 2017 BSc PA Deep Learning for Speaker Clustering
public code repository
Students: Jan Sonderegger and Patrick Walter
Fall 2017 BSc PA Deep Learning-basierte Voice Conversion mittels problemspezifischer Loss-Funktion
Fall 2017 MSc MT Learning to Cluster
top grade, paper at ANNPR 2018, and Dr. Waldemar Jucker award 2018
Student: Benjamin Bruno Meier
Fall 2017 MSc MT Reinforcement Learning to Play ‘Doom’
Spring 2017 MSc VT2 Deep Learning for End-to-End Voice Conversion - a Survey
Spring 2017 MSc VT1 Evaluating OMR Systems
Spring 2017 BSc BA Machine Learning for Speaker Clustering
paper at ANNPR 2018
Students: Patrick Gerber and Sebastian Glinksi Haefeli
Spring 2017 BSc BA Speaker Clustering with Metric Embeddings
Fall 2016 BSc PA Recurrent Neural Networks for Speaker Recognition
top grade
Student: Patrick Gerber
Fall 2016 BSc PA Pinball Wizard: Using Deep Reinforcement Learning to Train a Pinball Wizard
Fall 2016 BSc PA Deep OMR: New Ways for Optical Music Recognition
Fall 2016 MSc VT1 Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for newspaper Article Segmentation
top grade and paper at ICDAR 2017
Student: Benjamin Bruno Meier
Spring 2016 MSc VT1 Reinforcement Learning for Building Control
Spring 2016 BSc BA Instrumentenerkennung in Single-Source Audio Streams
top grade
Students: Yannick Streit & Leotrim Zulfio
Spring 2016 BSc BA Automatische Stimmerkennung mit Deep Learning (Neuronalen Netzen)
top grade and paper at MLSP 2017
Students: Yanick Xavier Lukic and Carlo Vogt
Spring 2016 BSc BA Künstliche Intelligenz für das Zahlenpuzzle 2048
top grade
Student: Micha Schwendener
Fall 2015 BSc PA Künstliche Intelligenz für ‘Super Mario’ durch Neuroevolution
Fall 2015 BSc PA Sprechererkennung mit Deep Neural Networks
top grade and paper at MLSP 2016
Students: Yanick Xavier Lukic and Carlo Vogt
Fall 2015 BSc PA Automatische Erkennung der Akkordfolge in Popmusik
Spring 2015 BSc BA Erkennung von Hintergrundmusik in Broadcast Audio
Spring 2015 BSc BA Entwicklung einer Android-App zur Erkennung von Redeanteilen im Unterricht
Spring 2015 BSc BA Deep Learning für automatische Stimmerkennung
top grade
Student: Gabriel Eyyi
Fall 2014 BSc PA Hilti Big Data Competition: Recommender Systeme
Spring 2014 BSc BA Talkalyzer: Neue Algorithmen für automatische Sprecher-Erkennung
top grade
Student: Jan Stampfli
Spring 2014 BSc BA Talkalyzer: Mobile-App zur automatischen Sprecher-Erkennung
Fall 2013 BSc PA Web-Scale Datenanalyse auf einer Big Data Appliance
Fall 2013 BSc PA Einsatz von Graphenalgorithmen zur Verbesserung der Pünktlichkeit von Zügen

Types:

  • PA: Bachelor project thesis
  • BA: Bachelor thesis
  • VT1: Master specialization project thesis 1
  • VT2: Master specialization project thesis 2
  • MT: Master thesis
  • MAS: Master thesis in continuing education

Lectures & curriculae

Active

Tag Name Format Type Content Did what? When?
AI1 Artificial Intelligence 1 lecture & lab final year BSc computer science elective course; won best teaching award (3rd place) in 2019 foundational AI course based on Russell&Norvig’s book responsible, initiate, create, teach Spring 2017, fall 2017-2023
AI2 Artificial Intelligence 2 lecture & lab finale year BSc computer science / data science elective course developing fair algorithms; towards more general neural models responsible, co-initiate, co-create, co-teach Fall 2017, spring 2023-2025
INTAI Introduction to AI for Engineers block week elective final year block course for all engineering programmes short introduction based on AI1 responsible, initiate, create, teach Fall 2024

Previously

Tag Name Format Type Content Did what? When?
ML Machine Learning lecture & lab continuing education module in CAS Data Science Applications and CAS Machine Intelligence practical machine learning for data scientists responsible, initiate, create, teach Fall 2015-2016, spring 2017-2018, spring 2021, spring 2023
CVDL Computer Vision with Deep Learning lecture & lab finale year BSc computer science / data science elective course modern computer vision based on deep learning methodology (beyond CNNs and classification) initiate Fall 2022
RL Reinforcement Learning lecture & lab finale year BSc computer science / data science elective course introduction to reinforcement learning initiate Fall 2022
MLOps Machine Learning Operations lecture & lab finale year BSc computer science / data science elective course introduction to building, operating and maintaining machine learing pipelines and systems initiate Fall 2022
CAS MLOps Certificate of Advanced Studies in Machine Learning Operations on-premise one-year continuing education programme thorough introduction to MLOps and societal aspects of applied AI initiate Fall 2022  
MachLe Machine Learning lecture & lab MSc computer science & engineering elective course; won best teaching final round nomination in 2017 mid-level course on practical machine learning with a focus on deep learning responsible, initiate, co-create, co-teach Spring 2017-2020
MSE profile DS Profile Data Science in the Swiss Master of Science in Engineering MSc programme new profile within the joint Swiss engineering master’s degree, consisting of theoretical, foundational, and context modules on analytics, data engineering, and data management co-initiate, co-create, member of module groups Spring 2016  
EVA MI Lab Machine Intelligence Lab MOOC, colloquia & hackathon MSc extended advanced module (EVA) experience an online course on an advanced machine learning topic responsible, initiate, co-create, teach Fall 2015-2019
EVA AI Seminar Artificial Intelligence Semniar seminar, blog posts, talk MSc extended advanced module (EVA) read, understand and write scientific literature initiate, create, teach Spring 2017-2019
CAS Machine Intelligence Certificate of Advanced Studies in Machine Intelligence on-premise one-year continuing education programme thorough introduction to applied machine and deep learning, text analytics and big data initiate, co-create, module responsible Spring 2017  
DPD Data Product Design lecture, lab, guest appearances, video pitch continuing education module in CAS Data Science Applications and CAS Data Product Design business basics for techie data scientists initiate, co-create, co-teach Fall 2015-2017
PROG2 Programmieren 2 lecture & lab BSc computer science foundational module advanced Java programming & tooling co-create, teach Spring 2014-2017
Scripting Scripting lecture & lab continuing education module in CAS Information Engineering foundations of scripting for analytics with Python for data scientists initiate, create, teach Fall 2014-2015
MAS Data Science Master of Advanced Studies in Data Science on-premise multi-year programme continuing education program technically oriented data science education for university alumnis co-initiate, co-create Spring 2014-2015
IE1 Information Engineering 1 lecture & lab last year BSc computer science elective course introduction to information retrieval co-teach Fall 2015
Big Data Big Data lecture & lab continuing education module in CAS Information Engineering foundations and tools of processing at scale for data scientists co-teach Spring 2015
DSSY Decision Support Systems lecture & lab last year BSc industrial engineering course data warehousing & big data co-create, (co-)teach Spring 2013-2015
ITPROG IT Programming lecture & lab BSc industrial/aviation/transportation engineering foundational module introduction to programming with Python initiate, create, teach Fall 2014-2015
PPRG Prozedurale Programmierung lecture & lab BSc aviation/industrial engineering foundational module Java for beginners teach Fall 2013
PSIT 1&2 Projektschiene 1&2 guided project, reviews BSc computer science foundational module project track software development co-create Fall 2013
DAB1 Datenbanken 1 lecture BSc computer science foundational course relational algebra, databases, and SQL guest appearance Fall 2013
IRG Information Retrieval Grundlagen lecture & lab final year BSc computer science elective course foundations of textual information retrieval guest appearance Spring 2013

See also my Marburgian page for several lectures, labs and supervised theses in the area of Multimedia Analysis and Retrieval (2005-2009).