Passionate Researcher & Full-Stack Data Scientist,
Chair of Computer Networks, Brandenburg University of Technology (BTU).
After finishing my Master's Degree, I decided to conquer the world going into industry. My work at ALDI has taught & given me so much! · Decisions · Is it still fun? - Totally · Is it demanding (enough)? - Yes · Do you still it? - Very much so · Then why leave?
This was not it (yet) · something was calling for more · the next endeavor. Having spent a very grateful time in Science and Education at COMSYS1, Network Architectures Group2, RWTH Aachen, with Prof. Dr.-Ing. Klaus Wehrle (Klaus)1, Prof. Dr. rer.-nat. Oliver Hohlfeld2, and the family,
further following the White Rabbit, I am now a member of the Computer Networks Group at Brandenburg University of Technology (BTU), located in Cottbus, supervised by Oliver.
Finishing my Ph.D. (submitted) · Yes · Next venture? let's talk
import ray, numpy, pandas, matplotlib, seaborn, scipy, sklearn, networkx, nltk, gensim, nlp, torch, transformers
Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science
M.Sc. in Computer Science, 2013
B.Sc. in Computer Science, 2011
IT-Systemelektroniker, 2007
Apprenticeship
EWE Netz GmbH
Oldenburg, NI, DE Map
Projects · Publications · Teaching · Supervision ·
Research, Education, Academia
Ph.D. Candidate
Chair of Computer Networks1
Brandenburg University of Technology
Cottbus, BB, DE Map
References
Research, Education, Academia
Ph.D. Candidate
Network Architectures Group2Communication & Distributed Systems1
RWTH Aachen University
Aachen, NW, DE Map
References
Requirements Management, Central & International Buying, Retail
ALDI International Services
ALDI Einkauf GmbH & Co. oHG
Mülheim an der Ruhr, NW, DE Map
References
Projects · Publications · Teaching · Supervision ·
2023-01 | Service | I am happy to serve in this year’s Program Committee of the LocWeb Workshop once again taking place in conjunction with WWW'23. |
2022-11 | Service | I am delighted to announce participating in the Technical Program Committee of the ACM Web Science Conference ‘23. |
2022-10 | Teaching | We have been acknowledged as Runner-Up by BTU for our outstanding teaching efforts within both: Our Internet & Measurements lectures - Teaching Day. |
2022-08 | Misc | Meet me at ACM SIGCOMM! Good News, my tickets are booked for this year’s iteration in Amsterdam. I am very excited & happy participating at in-person conferences once again, meeting friends and colleagues in the pursuit of hottest research. |
Projects · Publications · Teaching · Supervision ·
During the first days of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s media regulator blocked access to many global social media platforms and news sites, including Twitter, Facebook, and the BBC. To bypass the information controls set by Russian authorities, pro-Ukrainian groups explored unconventional ways to reach out to the Russian population, such as posting war-related content in the user reviews of Russian business available on Google Maps or Tripadvisor. This paper provides a first analysis of this new phenomenon by analyzing the creative strategies to avoid state censorship. Specifically, we analyze reviews posted on these platforms from the beginning of the conflict to September 2022. We measure the channeling of war messages through user reviews in Tripadvisor and Google Maps, as well as in VK, a popular Russian social network. Our analysis of the content posted on these services reveals that users leveraged these platforms to seek and exchange humanitarian and travel advice, but also to disseminate disinformation and polarized messages. Finally, we analyze the response of platforms in terms of content moderation and their impact.
[ submitted ]
Nowadays day-to-day digital communication and social life has only fortified with the ongoing pandemic. People enjoy communication and information across various (direct) messaging platforms and accepted its ever-increasing impact on public discourse, and thus society. While most traditional platforms implement user profiles enabling social credit, the new landscape now also includes anonymity. Yet, a new type of applications combining anonymity with a strong spatial focus, hyperlocality, emerged over recent years. To this point, platform implications of both uniquely combined design properties largely remain unknown. In this thesis (with minor exceptions) we provide a first data-driven holistic view on Jodel that combines both properties. We leverage unbiased and complete ground truth information to dissect a plethora of communities across two different countries: Germany & the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This work follows a platform perspective identifying four major essentially important areas revolving around the individual. That is, we begin with a broad analysis of three User Adoption processes along three different applications. After discussing our measurements of the start and user base adoption of the German COVID-19 digital contact tracing application, we provide evidence of well-established platforms being re-purposed as a side channel to evade censorship in the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian hybrid war. We further showcase that even the very same platform ingredients may yield vastly different outcomes on the messaging app Jodel. While any online platform builds upon user User Interactions, we structurally characterize Jodel behavior across both countries. We discuss structural disparities and detail platform implications - solely induced by local user behavior. An in-depth look into the Saudi community landscape closes a research gap to platform usage in non-Western societies, identifying fundamental differences. Further, we discuss User Content analyzing information diffusion. Taking content to the next level, we developed a multidimensional classification scheme for intents (why) and topics (what) of social media messages and provide details of a crowdsourced campaign for Saudi Arabian contents. With neural word embeddings as a tool for making text tangible and the prevalence of emoji in social media communication, we discuss quantitative & qualitative insights to word-emoji embeddings reflecting semantics. Additionally, we make such embeddings interpretable and provide evidence that our method is well in line with human judgement. In terms of User Management, we detail insights to distributed moderation processes and model the threat of abusive content. In the long term, platforms need to establish a sustainable, preferably growing, environment. That is, we next discuss user lifetime and possibly early churn factors, while modeling user lifetime from metadata. We finish with a blueprint of data-driven long term quality of experience analyzes in a controlled massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) environment.
A subset of massively multiplayer online games (MMOG) feature long-term game rounds in which players interact for months or even years. The player experience of such long-term games cannot be entirely captured by current study methods, in particular not at scale assessing large player populations. To address this challenge, we posit that long-term, round based games such as Tribal Wars (browser-based) enable a data-driven perspective on long-term game dynamics and experience. In a preliminary study, we monitor and characterize the entire longitudinal game state of a Tribal Wars round that was played by 16k players for 1.5 years, enabling us to investigate behavioral patterns of all active players. We identify features that capture the in-game success and relate to the player experience. We show that only successful players keep up playing. We open source our dataset enabling reproducibility & future research.
Projects · Publications · Teaching · Supervision ·
Projects · Publications · Teaching · Supervision ·