My name is Marco and I am currently based in Munich, Germany. I am CTO at TAWNY, a company specializing in Affective Computing and Human Behavior Understanding. Additionally, I am teaching at the University of Munich, covering the field of "Empathic Artificial Intelligence / Affective Computing".
On a higher level, my work revolves around the question how humans and machines will work and live together in the future. How can we make user interfaces more intelligent? Or: how can we design user interfaces for intelligent machines? Can we adopt forms of human-to-human interaction for creating empathic machines? How can we make sure that increasingly intelligent machines will augment our capabilities instead of making them obsolete?
On a technical level, our work makes heavy use of the recent advancements in AI and especially machine learning. Trying to enable machines to understand human behavior comprises wrangling lots of unstructured data, from physiological sensor streams to large amounts of video data. At TAWNY, we are dealing with quite a few computer vision and general deep learning topics, but at the same time, we have a broad spectrum of activities to put the core technology into actual products. Since we are a small team of experts, I am still quite hands-on with most topics we're dealing with, from the initial research to the final application development and deployment.
Being part of the company's management team obviously leads to a set of additional responsibilities apart from the technical topics, such as leadership, strategy, financials, funding, sales, etc. This broad range of activities can be stressful, but I really enjoy being able to influence the bigger picture of where a team or a company is heading.