New at the Department: Professor Dr. Kristian Kersting

Since the beginning of May, Prof. Kersting is a member of the Department of Computer Science. He leads the Institute for Machine Learning and is a member of the interdisciplinary Centre for Cognitive Science at TU Darmstadt. Prof. Kersting studied Computer Science at the University of Freiburg, where he received his PhD. He was a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT in the USA and supervised a research group at the Fraunhofer Institute IAIS before he researched in the field of Data Mining at the University of Bonn and at the University of Dortmund.

At the Department of Computer Science, Prof. Kersting is a full professor for the core area Machine Learning. „Can machines learn from their own experiences and from others to improve their performance?“ and how could one manage that „machines can learn as easily and quickly as human beings?“ are two questions out of many that Prof. Kersting deals with. He is very ambitious since, on the long run, he would like to contribute to a development of awareness for machine learning and data in the general public and he hopes that Darmstadt will become a centre for machine learning and computer science in general.

Prof. Kersting is enthusiastic about the Department's interdisciplinary profile and the interesting research areas of his colleagues as interdisciplinarity is an inherent part of the core area Machine Learning, where he researches, amongst others, together with plant physiologists, how plants react to different kinds of stress such as to lack of water or parasites. He also appreciates the central location of the Department in the city centre, surrounded by social life and with a view over the Herrngarten-park. He connects this centrality with the latest observation, namely that computer science in general receives more attention and is becoming central in society and that other disciplines and fields aim for profound collaboration. In this interdisciplinarity, Prof. Kersting sees potential for great breakthroughs in the future.

We wish Professor Kersting great success and a good start at our Department!