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This is my home page where you can find a lot more information about me and my work. I studied at Technical University of Berlin both for a Diploma degree in Computer Science with focus on Computer Graphics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in 1997 and a PhD degree in Theoretical Statistics in 2000, respectively. Since 2022, I am a professor in Computer Science at Hasso Plattner Institute and the University of Potsdam and chair of the research group on Artificial Intelligence and Sustainability.

For the past 25 years, I have worked in both basic and applied science: For the first 15 years of my professional life, I was predominantly working on the basic research myself, while focusing on managing applied science for the past 10 years. I have had the great fortune to work at Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and Zalando. I am now back to working on both basic and applied science as well as teaching.

I want my work to have a positive impact on many people’s lives. I particularly enjoy the application of principled research to large-scale real-world problems, learning new things every day and getting to work with people.

I fundamentally believe in a people-first approach: As a scientist, I want to solve problems that people actually have – also called “working backwards” and “customer-obsession”. As a manager, I always put people (development) over project (success) – the former being “the end” and the latter being “the means” (and not the other way around!). As a scientific leader, I always prefer to discuss ideas with another scientist over just reading their work – learning happens faster and in a more sustained way in a dialog rather than in reading.

I do not accept existing scientific boundaries and think that the largest breakthroughs will be made at the intersection of existing disciplines. If you would like to learn more about my research work, have a look at the Research page. My research interests include approximate computing, Bayesian inference and decision making, game theory, information retrieval, natural language processing, computer vision, distributed systems, learning theory and knowledge representation and reasoning. I have published over 80 peer reviewed conference and journal papers in these fields.

I am trying to keep this information up-to-date but if you are looking for the latest information about me, please check out:

If you try to get in contact with me, please email me at ralf@herbrich.me.