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hello gif

I'm Markus.

About

I am an Austrian Computer Science and Mathematics enthusiast.
I combine both of my passions by pursuing a PhD on Probabilistic Programming.


PhD Research

Probabilistic programming provides an intuitive means to specify probabilistic models as programs. By enabling automatic Bayesian posterior inference, probabilistic programming systems allow the practitioners to focus on iterative modelling.
However, this systems still have a high barrier of entry and in my research I develop sound program analysis techniques to improve the development experience.

Master's Thesis

The goal of my Master's thesis was to build a Machine Learning model for the prediction of performance regressions in software projects. Using the openly available data of Mozilla's Firefox project, a novel labeling approach was found to intercept potential faulty commits before the would go to production.

Bachelor's Thesis

My Bachelor's thesis is about a particular approach to reinforcement learning, where the return is modelled directly by categorical distributions rather than only its expected value. I derived the sample complexity of tabular algorithms and considered the incorporation of risk measures in the action selection process. Results published in SIMODS.

reinforcement learning diagram categorical distribution example


Blog

I started a blog about topics I find interesting. This can be fancy algorithms, beautiful mathematical results, etc. There you may find explanations and background information about some of my projects.


Projects

TinyPPL: Educational implementation of a probabilistic programming language in Julia

To better understand the inner workings of PPLs and inference algorithms, I implement them from scratch without too many abstractions.

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Predicting Chemical Properties with 3D Convolutional Neural Network

Describe a crystal molecule through Fourier transform in reciprocal space and predict enthalpy per atom.

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Super Human Humor with GPT2

Scraped r/jokes and fine-tuned pretrained GPT2 on it. The results are hilarious.

I just saw a guy being chased by a lion, he got out of his car, took out a hunting rifle and yelled "Quick, grab that damn animal and drive!" I thought to myself, "Man, that's gonna give me a headache"

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Chess Engine

Programming a fast chess simulator and using MTD(f) as search algorithm. Final engine includes a small opening book and self generated 3-men endgame tablebase.
It is on par with chess.com engines up to level 20 which they consider to be advanced to expert level strength.

Game as white vs chess.com computer level 16.

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MNIST from Scratch

Implementation of automatic differentiation library and testing with deep neural network on MNIST dataset in JULIA.

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CartPole with RL

Reinforcement Learning in continuous state space. The task was to swingup and balance a pendulum by only applying a horizontal force to the cart. The states were approximated by a neural net.

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Goomo

The Goomo robot was product of a student project during my internship at iteratec. A Segway vehicle with Android smartphone on top allowed us to creatively try to write autonomous driving software.


Finite Field Generator

Ridiculously slow calculation of addition and multiplication table of any finite field based on modular integer polynomial arithmetic.
Produces fancy pictures.

fancy picture

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Dwelled in iOS Development

I really got into programming when I started playing around with Swift and building apps for the iPhone.
My best efforts were a messenger with GPS capabilities and an app which collects statistics like acceleration and velocity of the phone.


Personal Website

I created a website to show off my stuff.


Contact

You can find some of the above projects on my GitHub and you can send me a message per e-mail.