About
I am a researcher and lecturer at the intersection of the Social Studies of Science & Technology and Computer Science. I am University Assistant (prae doc) at the Department of Cross-Disciplinary Strategies. Applied Studies in Art, Science, Philosophy, and Global Challenges at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. In addition I am lecturer at the TU Wien for Critical Algorithm Studies and Responsible Research and Innovation (Summer Term 2022).
In the past I have been visiting researcher at the University of Paderborn, joining Jutta Weber and Eyke Hüllermeier at the Project The Scoring Society.
In September 2021 I finished my master's degree in Science & Technology Studies at University of Vienna under the supervision of Ulrike Felt where I worked on how pracitioners address uncertainty when using crowd sourcing to annotate/label data sets.
I have also been researching the so-called 'AMS Algorithm', an algorithm that is used by the Austrian Public Employment Agency to predict the prospects of job seekers and based on that allocate resources. This is a significant case study for the use of algorithmic and data-driven systems by public administration.
Finally, being a disciplinary hybrid myself, I am currently completing a small project on inter- and transdisciplinary teaching at four higher education institutions in Vienna that are member of the Center for Technology & Society.
I have had multiple media appearances (Radio FM4, ORF ZIB 2, MALMOE) on issues relating to information technology/digital transformation and society. I have also been speaker at non-academic events on the topics of, e.g., Critical Algorithm Studies and the AMS-Algorithm.
I was University Assistant (prae doc) at the Technical University of Vienna from 2019-2021 at the Multidisciplinary Design & User Research Group where I taught courses on Critical Algorithm Studies, Digital Transformation and co-supervised student projects that used human-centered design processes.
While I have been focusing on the social study of algorithmic and data-driven systems, I have originally been trained as a computer scientist and have been working in that field for several years.
Before joining TU Wien I was working several years in software research & development that revolved around natural language processing and knowledge representation. During that time I was designing and programming scalable software that involved big data techniques, including near-real time processing, relational databases, document-based databases, search engines and graph stores. My main tasks were (re)writing performant and scalable code and text understanding across languages. Some of what I contributed to powers, e.g., the United Nations Environment Programme's Web Intelligence dashboard.
I completed my master and bachelor degrees at Technical University of Vienna, with my study programmes Software & Information Engineering and Computational Intelligence focusing on algorithms, data structures and artificial intelligence (i.e. logic, knowledge representation, and machine learning). I also took several courses in information security and conducted my master thesis on information extraction from underground market places at the International Secure Systems Lab.
In my spare time, I am a trained field ornithologist (by BirdLife Austria). This is to contribute to the monitoring of bird biodiversity and population developments, as birds (and other life forms) are increasingly under stress due to climate change, intensifying agriculture and other forms of habitat destruction.