Hi, my name is Mikio L. Braun and I’m a PostDoc in machine learning at the Technische Universität Berlin and co-founder of twimpact.
My main research interests are basic machine learning research and social network analysis. I have a low priority background task somewhere in my brain thinking about how to automatically learn good features and invariances from data so that you don’t have to do all that hand engineering of kernel functions and representations. There is also a blazingly fast kernel learner hidden in my drawer which has been rejected from NIPS two times, but for one reason or another, I haven’t yet been able to put those ideas into paper form.
For almost a year two years now we’re analyzing Twitter data. It is such an incredible huge amount of data, that it is almost impossible to think about ways of analyzing it. Hopefully I’m right about the “almost” part.
Besides my actual research in machine learning, I’m also interested a lot in the technological aspects of machine learning research. That might explain why I volunteered to take care of building up the new compute cluster when our group moved from Fraunhofer to the Technische Universität Berlin. Luckily, we were able to hire an excellent system administrator two years later.
I also have a certain weakness for trying out new programming languages. My colleagues make fun of the huge stack of programming language related books on my desk and take bets on what will happen first: either the stack of books will shield the view out of the window, or it will collapse and bury me underneath it.
Finally, I probably spend a bit too much time on blogging and twittering, but already as a kid I was playing editor (actually, editor and main author) to a little electronics journal, so there is probably little I can do about it.
Sites
Projects