First of all, congratulations on your new status as tenured faculty. What does it mean to you to have reached this point in your career?
For me, this is an important goal that I have been working towards for a very long time. I am therefore very happy to have achieved it now. I am also very grateful for the appreciation of my work by my colleagues in the field. Their recommendation for tenure status is a special distinction and honor for me.
What makes working at CISPA special for you?
I work in an area that is not directly part of the core area of information security at CISPA. I am therefore all the more delighted that CISPA is continuing to expand in the field of machine learning, as this area offers great potential to open up new perspectives on information security. It has been great to be actively involved in the growth of CISPA's two research areas in this field in recent years. The collaboration with the colleagues and PhD students is fantastic. The opportunities that CISPA offers PhD students are very attractive and were also a reason for me to choose CISPA.
What were the most important research topics that occupied you during your tenure-track phase?
One important topic was the further development and improvement of algorithms for federated learning, which I worked on together with my first PhD student at CISPA, Xiaowen Jiang. Federated learning means training several small models to work together effectively. We designed an algorithm that also takes into account the similarity between the different clients. That was definitely a highlight of the last few years. From a theoretical perspective, the result is very elegant. What we can still improve a little is the transfer into practice. At the moment, the analysis development of algorithms is still a rather theoretical project. In the future, we can strengthen the transfer into code that developers can download and use in applications.
What was your greatest success during your time at CISPA or what moment are you most proud of?
There are quite a few moments. The ERC grant certainly deserves special mention. It wasn't easy to get there either. At the beginning of my time at CISPA, I applied for an ERC Starting Grant, but was not selected. The following year, I didn't try again straight away. I needed time to think about the feedback. I was all the happier when I was awarded the ERC Consolidator Grant last year. This success would not have been possible without the support of my team and the inspiring collaboration with my colleagues at CISPA.
What do you want to focus on in your research over the next few years?
The work on the ERC grant-funded project “Collaborative Minds” will certainly keep my research group busy. We will be looking at collaborative learning in the project. The aim is to create a system where different machine learning models can learn and benefit from each other. There are various aspects that I will be looking at with individual PhD students.
Another goal we have set ourselves is technology transfer. In recent years, we have implemented high-quality projects with a strong theoretical focus. Now I'm thinking about what our results mean for society and how end users can benefit from them in five or ten years' time. This plan is not quite concrete yet, but once I have gotten used to the tenured status, I will delve into it and look for a post-doc or PhD student to focus on it.
Will anything change in your work now that you are tenured?
That's not an easy question to answer. Nothing will change immediately. My day is still similar or even the same. What I see as an issue in the future, especially if my group continues to grow over the next few years, is to work a little on my efficiency in mentoring. Over the past year, I've noticed that the additional administrative tasks have increased significantly. In future, I want to make sure that this doesn't get out of hand and that I have enough time for research. I need to find a healthy balance.
Thank you very much for the interview.
