I am a senior researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge leading the Online Services and Advertising and Applied Games group together with Ralf Herbrich. Our work is focused on the application of large scale machine learning and probabilistic modelling techniques to a wide range of problems including online advertising, web search, and games. I have a particular passion for the game of go and the quest for developing a go engine that plays as good as the best human players.

Before joining the Cambridge lab of Microsoft Research, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Computer Science at Royal Holloway, University of London working on learning theory and machine learning algorithms with Prof. John Shawe-Taylor. View the beautiful campus of Royal Holloway here.

Before that, I worked with Nici Schraudolph and Prof. Petros Koumoutsakos as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Computational Science (ICOS) which is part of the Department of Computer Science of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zürich (ETH). Topics of research were machine learning and large-scale nonlinear optimisation.

I received my doctorate (Dr. rer. nat) from the Department of Computer Science of the Technical University of Berlin, where I was first a member of the Neural Information Processing group of Prof. Klaus Obermayer and later joined the Statistics group of Prof. Ulrich Kockelkorn.