My Vision

Artificial intelligence is no longer science fiction, but can be found all around us. Be it the personal assistant on your smartphone, the driving assistant of your car, or the setup of your favorite clothing store - chances are that all of these leverage AI and/or have been created with the help of AI. As such, it might seem that AI is democratized and more or less easily available as a supporting tool for researchers and businesses. However, the majority of AI solutions present in our daily life has been developed by and are only available to large companies due to the associated personnel costs of employing data scientists.

Considering the impressive advances AI achieved in the recent years in fields such as natural language processing, image processing and product recommendation, this is unfortunate. Instead, I believe that everyone should be enabled to leverage these approaches to improve the world we live in. Therefore, my goal is to democratize AI and in particular machine learning (ML) by research in the area of automated machine learning (AutoML). I aim at enabling researchers from other disciplines and companies, which might not be able to afford large data science teams, to leverage ML through the means of AutoML tools.

To achieve this, I research on interactive and explainable AutoML targeted at supporting data scientists and domain experts in leveraging ML for their particular application in an intuitive, human-centered and explainable way. Together with my awesome colleagues, we work hard to make existing AutoML tools easier to use and understand by non-experts and in particular improve the understandability of the underlying AutoML process. We hope that this will demystify AutoML, such that non-expert users can interact with AutoML tools by injecting domain knowledge and tailoring the search process to their needs.