OUR TEAM

I am a full professor (W3) at the Computer Science Department in Goethe University Frankfurt. I am also a hessian.AI member and affiliated at the Center for Brains Minds and Machines at MIT. Before, I was ass. prof. at Singapore University of Technology and Design.  Previously, I was a postdoc fellow at MIT in the Center for Brains Minds and Machines with Prof. Tomaso Poggio. I was also affiliated at the Laboratory for Computational and Statistical Learning. I pursued my doctoral degree in Computer Vision at ETH Zurich.

Gemma Roig, Prof. Dr.
Professor for Brain-inspired Artificial Intelligence
Lab director (PI)

Secretary in the computer science department at Goethe University.

Gregor Höhn
Secretary

Secretary in the computer science department at Goethe University.

Ulrike Knauf
Secretary

I am a postdoctoral fellow working with Dr. Gemma Roig at the Goethe University Frankfurt and Dr. Radoslaw Cichy at the Freie-Universität Berlin, funded by a FIAS scholarship. Previously I completed a dual Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience and computer science at Michigan State University. Before that, I studied math and worked in VLSI at Apple. Currently, my main interest is understanding emerging representations in artificial and human neurons.

Sari Saba-Sadiya 
Postdoc fellow

I am a postdoctoral fellow working with Dr. Gemma Roig. Previously I completed my PhD at CerCo-CNRS UMR 5549, Toulouse. I am interested in understanding networks using a special pair of glasses: one which has a machine learning lens on one and neuroscience on the other. Specifically, I am interested in building networks that are more biological and in turn using them and their properties to get a peek into the human brain.

Bhavin Choksi
Postdoc fellow

I'm a PhD student at Goethe University Frankfurt working with Prof. Gemma Roig and Prof. Visvanathan Ramesh. I did my bachelor's and master's in computer science at Istanbul Technical University. I am doing my research on the topic of AI for education. My special interest is in making connections between human and machine learning systems.

Gamze Akyol
PhD student

I am a PhD student at Goethe University Frankfurt, supervised by Prof. Roig and
supported by Prof. Zicari. I did my Bachelors and Masters in Computer Science at KIT in Karlsruhe, Germany, and worked as a Machine Learning Engineer in the Netherlands. My work is focused on the application of AI systems: how can we trust them to make fair and ethical decisions?

Dennis Vetter
PhD student

I am a Phd student at the neurodynamics of visual cognition lab, Freie-Universität Berlin, where I am advised by Prof. Radoslaw Martin Cichy. During my PhD, I will also work with Prof. Gemma Roig's group and focus on self-supervised models to predict and explain brain data. I completed my master degree in electronic engineering in the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in June 2019. My master project is mainly about utilizing digital image processing and machine learning methods to realize nondestructive analysis of materials. From October 2019 to June 2020, I used to work as an intern in General Electrical (GE China) company, using Python to do medical image processing. In June 2016 I graduated from the Sun-Yat-Sen University in China with my bachelor degree in optics.

Manshan Guo
PhD student

I’m a PhD student working in the field of cognitive computational neuroscience, supervised by Prof. Gemma Roig. I’m both part of the CVAI lab at Goethe University and the Ernst Strüngmann Institute for Neuroscience (in Cooperation with Max Planck Society) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. My current research focuses on understanding how humans and machines abstract semantic knowledge when presented with multimodal sources of information.

Martina Vilas

I’m a PhD student at Goethe University Frankfurt working with Prof. Gemma Roig. I did my Bachelors and Masters in Computer Science at Information Technology University Lahore (ITU). I have received a doctoral scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) to pursue my research in Germany. I’m interested in applying computer vision techniques to build novel zero-shot models for semantic segmentation, scene understanding, pose estimation, motion feature extraction and analysis for emotion classification from video.

Muhammad Ahsan   
PhD student

I am a Ph.D. student at Goethe University Frankfurt under the supervision of Professor Gemma Roig. Both my Bachelor's and Master's degrees were completed at Goethe University, specializing in Computer Science. I am part of the ARENA project, which focuses on studying the development of abstract representations in multimodal models. To achieve my research objectives, I collaborate with psychology and cognitive neuroscience researchers. Furthermore, I am interested in multimodal self-supervised and zero-shot learning techniques, as well as the creation of efficient systems and  mechanistic interpretability.

Timothy Schaumlöffel
PhD student

I am a PhD student at Goethe University Frankfurt, co-supervised by Prof. Gemma Roig and Prof. Visvanathan Ramesh. I did my Bachelor's and Masters in Computer Science at Istanbul Technical University (ITU), Turkey. During my Bachelor's and Master's, I worked on face biometrics and anomaly detection. My current work focuses on explainable and transparent AI systems for education. I am also interested in representation and metric learning.

Alperen Kantarcı
PhD student

I’m a Ph.D. student working on the intersection of simulations and deep learning at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies supervised by Dr. Roberto Covino and Prof. Gemma Roig. I am a recipient of a doctoral scholarship from the Polytechnische Gesellschaft. I am currently researching making molecular dynamics simulations faster and more steerable using deep-learning generative models. I also develop deep learning methods for the visual arts as a hobby.

Magnus Petersen

I am a PhD student at the lab of Prof. Dr. Gemma Roig, focusing on exploring the connection between the human brain and its cortical functions through the lens of deep neural networks. My primary research aim is to understand why specific deep neural networks can predict processes in the human brain despite their biological implausibility, delving into the realms of interpretable AI and neuroscience.
I am also one of the developers of the toolbox Net2Brain, which is a valuable tool for exploring the relationship between artificial neural networks and brain activity.

Domenic Bersch
PhD student

I am a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam (VISLab, Informatics Institute) supervised by Iris Groen and Cees Snoek, as well as Gemma Roig at Goethe University through the European AI Laboratory ELLIS. I hold an Integrated Masters degree (BSc & MSc) in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens. My research focuses on the representational alignment between deep video-AI and the human brain and behaviour. Through assessing the extent of alignment in current state-of-the-art models and researching methods to explicitly increase alignment, I aim to work towards the goal of enhancing the models’ robustness and generalisability.

Christina Sartzetaki
Affiliate PhD student
[personal website]

I am a PhD student at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, supervised by Prof. Biplab Banerjee, Prof. Subhasis Chaudhuri and Prof. Gemma Roig. I did my Master's from the Indian Institute of Technology Patna, while my Bachelor's from Maulana Abul Kalam Azad University of Technology. Previously, I interned at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru and Tata Consultancy Services-Research and Innovation Labs during my Bachelor's and Master's, respectively. My current research domain is Continual Learning in Computer Vision.

Samrat Mukherjee
Affiliate PhD student

I pursued a PhD at the Goethe University Frankfurt advised by Prof. Gemma Roig. I am a great admirer of the field of machine learning for natural language processing. Before starting my PhD, I was a data analyst at PwC Germany, where I participated in establishing a collaboration with the Fraunhofer Institute IAIS and conducted research work for my master thesis on question answering with neural networks. Currently, I am analyzing the potential of low-resource languages and their historical literature on the example of foundational NLP tasks such as named entity recognition. For accomplishing my research goals, I collaborate with NLP researchers from the IT University of Copenhagen and historical linguists from the Goethe University Frankfurt.

Sajawel Ahmed
Affiliate Researcher

Giovanna Maria Dimitri is a researcher at the University of Siena, in the Artificial Intelligence Group led by Prof. Marco Gori. She previously completed her master (with distinction) and PhD in Computer Science at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Prof. Pietro Liò in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for biomedical data processing at the Department of Computer Science, and she holds a bachelor and master degree in computer engineering from the University of Siena, both completed with distinction. In 2023 she won the competitive Ai-Net Fellows Scholarship sponsored by DAAD, and she therefore was selected and visited the lab of Prof. Gemma Roig in December 2023. Since then started the collaboration with Prof. Gemma Roig group. She has been interviewed by several journals and tv shows in Italy for her expertise in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, and she has an extensive experience in terms of science communication events. Her research interests concern artificial intelligence, in a wide spectrum of applications, as well as in the development of foundational models.

Giovanna Maria Dimitri
Visiting scholar DAAD AI-Net Fellow
[personal website]

Master Students

Current:
Matthias Fulde
Yujin So
Samantha Escobar
Lukas Müller

Gone but not forgotten:
Hoang Tu Ngo
Elias Poensgen
Lukas Licitar
Teresa Werthmann
Frederike Laufenberg
Daniel Pietschmann
Yannic Vorpahl 
Tim Frommknecht
Daniel Pietschmann
Yannic Vorpahl
David Lüdke
Lukas Müller
Hoang Duc Anh Tran
Tuan Minh Do

Bachelor Students

Current:
Anthea Hohmann

Gone but not forgotten:
Felix Nonnengießer
Quang Anh Hong
Jonas Roemer 
Nizar Bikti
Carla Frenzel
Sandesh Baral
Shivan Oskan
Marius Bange
Yusuf Baran
Tim Ansink
Domenic Bersch
Bipul Mani Pokhrel
Snizhana Fedchenko
Tra Mi Thi Tran
Tomislav Vrdoljak
Max Krawietz
Dirk Neuhäuser
Ali Poursotoudeh Tehrani
Johannes Bastian

Alumni

* Prof. Dr. Hilde Kühne - Prof at Goethe Uni (2021 - 2022). Left to work as professor at University of Bonn. [personal website]

*Dr. Irene de Zarzà - Visiting PhD student at Goethe Uni (2023). Left to work as Assistant Professor at Universidad Francisco de Vitoria. [personal website]

*Dr. J. de Curtò - Visiting PhD student at Goethe Uni (2023). Left to work as researcher at the BARCELONA Supercomputing Center and as "Profesor Asociado" at Universidad Pontificia Comillas. [personal website]

*Dr. Gereziher Adhane - Visiting PhD student at Goethe Uni (2023). Left to work as Senior Research Engineer at Iquadrat. [personal website]

* Dr. Kshitij Dwivedi - PhD student at SUTD and Goethe Uni (2018-2022). Left to work at Amazon Research. [personal website]

* Dr. Thao Phuong Ha Thi - PhD student at SUTD (2018 - 2022). [personal website]

* Ishaan Singh Rawal - Visiting graduate student at Goethe Uni (2021).

* Jiashun Wang - Visiting PhD student at Goethe Uni (2021).

*Dr. Pham Quang Hieu - PhD student at SUTD (2017-2020). Left to work in Facebook.

* Gabriel Jiahui Huang - RA at SUTD-MIT IDC (2018-2020). Left for a master at UBC.

* Dr. Hossein Mousavi - PostDoc at SUTD-MIT IDC (2018-2020). Left for a PostDoc at SUTD.

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