After completing my studies in computer science in Braunschweig and Magdeburg in Germany, I was awarded a Fulbright graduate-student fellowship. One year at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (USA) turned into five, and resulted in a M.Sc. and a Ph.D. Funded by a Marie-Curie fellowship, I then spent a couple of years as a postdoctoral researcher at Projet PRIMA (INRIA Rhône-Alpes) in France before joining the Montefiore Institute. The academic year 2008–09 I spent on sabbatical leave at the Department of Empirical Inference (B. Schölkopf) at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, with which I continue to be affiliated as a guest scientist.

My research activities are in computer vision and machine learning. Much of my research is motivated by the concept of agents that use vision as a mode of perception in an interactive context. My long-term goal is to understand biological systems and to construct artificial systems that learn to see and to act through sensorimotor interaction with their environment.

Using similar approaches and techniques, this long-term vision is complemented by work on applications such as video analysis, object detection, classification, recognition, tracking, etc. in the context of surveillance, augmented reality, human-computer interaction, robotics, and medical applications.

I am currently a member of the European research projects PACO-PLUS and SignSpeak, and of the EUCogII research network. Until early 2007 I directed the TRICTRAC project that drew remarkable attention from the media.