Markus Brenner

+** (****) ******

aceld8@r.postjobfree.com

www.linkedin.com/in/markusbrenner

June 12, 2014

Recruitment team

Dear Sir or Madam,

I am seeking a position as a Data/Research Scientist to start August 2014 and attach my CV for

consideration. As an Electronic Engineering/Computer Science PhD Candidate (graduating July 2014)

with 5 years of professional experience as a Software Engineer, I believe that my unique background is

an ideal fit for this position.

I gained hands-on experience in scientific Data Analysis, Machine Learning, Multimedia Information

Retrieval and Computer Vision during my PhD research on multimodal context-based people

recognition across photo collections. Broadening my research to Big Data Analysis and Natural

Language Processing (semantic topic modeling), I subsequently conducted research on large

unstructured photo collections such as Flickr, and in particular, on detecting and understanding social

events like festivals that people post about. I researched predictive models that link and combine multiple

types of semi-unstructured information (image, text, time, geography, users, etc.) across different sources.

During my 4 visits and collaborations at various research institutions around the world, I continued to

make research contributions and leverage my expertise. To date, I have detailed my findings in over 10

IEEE/ACM publications and presented them nearly 20 times at international conferences, workshops and

seminars for global audiences of up to 300 people. Both helped me acquire solid writing and public

speaking skills, and they strengthened my ability to communicate directly and effectively with many

people of very diverse professional and cultural backgrounds.

I sharpened my management and multicultural communication skills as a key representative for a large

3-year European Union-funded research project on distributed socially-aware computation involving 15

institutions from 8 countries. I oversaw the timely preparation and submission of research works and

delivery reports, participated in quarterly project meetings throughout Europe, and co-organized a project

meeting for nearly 50 attendees in London. In this role, I also expanded my experience to Big Data

processing and Gamification.

Complementing my research management experience is over 10 years of C/C++ software engineering

experience, including my professional work designing and implementing Consumer Electronics software

running on an embedded system-on-a-chip Linux platform. Moreover, I have over 5 years of experience in

scientific computation and visualization using Python/NumPy and Matlab. Examples of my past personal

software projects are: MediaCruiser at bit.ly/1nqaC9K and mp4UI at bit.ly/1oB5Fbn.

It would be an extraordinary opportunity for me to apply and further develop my skill set, professional

experience and research interests with your organization, and I look forward to speaking with you in the

near future. Thank you very much for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

Markus Brenner

Attached: Curriculum Vitae

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Markus Brenner +44 (7754) 156091

aceld8@r.postjobfree.com

Curriculum Vitae www.linkedin.com/in/markusbrenner

Summary

PhD Research Candidate seeking position as Data/Research Scientist to start Au-

gust 2014. Creative and driven to conceptualize ideas, lead research, prototype models

and architect and engineer scalable production-grade data systems. Specializes in

Machine Learning, Data Analysis/Mining, Multimedia Information Retrieval, and Com-

puter Vision, with experience and interests in Big Data and Cloud Computing. 5 years

professional experience as Software Engineer in Consumer Electronics. Willing to

relocate; approved I-140 (prior H-1B) and thus H-1B cap exempt.

Research Experience

07/2010–07/2014 PhD in Electronic Engineering/Computer Science, See section Education.

10/2013–03/2014 PhD Research Assistant, Computer Science Department, Technion – Israel Institute

of Technology, Haifa, Israel.

Conducted research on Multimodal Face and People Recognition.

08/2009–01/2010 Graduate Research Assistant, School of Computing, National University of Singa-

pore, Singapore.

Conducted research on Computational Photography, Computer Vision and Machine Learning.

08/2008–08/2009 Graduate Research Assistant, NICTA (National ICT Australia), Canberra, Australia.

Conducted research on Structured Feature Representation for Image Retrieval.

Conducted research on Recognition of Buildings for Image-Based Localization.

09/2003–04/2004 Research Assistant, New Media Communication Center, Fraunhofer Research Society,

Stuttgart, Germany.

Conducted research for diploma thesis on Creating Rich Media using MPEG-4 and XMT.

Work Experience

10/2004–08/2008 Software Engineer, Sigma Designs, Milpitas, USA.

Developed software for Portable Media Players, Blu-Ray Players, IPTV Streaming Set-top

Boxes and Digital Media Adapters running on an embedded system-on-a-chip Linux platform.

Worked closely with hardware team to debug and launch prototype devices.

Provided onsite and online technical support to international customers.

Served as technical company representative at Consumer Electronics Show 2006 and 2007.

Specific implementations included: HDMI-CEC stack, USB-MTP stack using sqlite, propri-

etary C library, XHTML parser/renderer, XHTML-based user interface for media browsing

and playback, libraries/drivers for hardware components (embedded media playback engine,

audio/video hub, tuner, remote control, etc.), real-time audio recording/encoding and video

stream recording, third-party library integration.

05/2004–10/2004 Software Engineer, Sigma Designs Europe, Paris, France.

Developed and maintained SDK for Portable Media Player and software (as described above).

08/2002–03/2003 Software Engineering Intern, Sigma Designs, Milpitas, USA.

Developed media playback and firmware update applications for MPEG-4/DivX DVD Players.

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09/2001–08/2002 Software Engineer (Freelance Assistant), Incedo, Stuttgart, Germany.

Developed a client application integrating into Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, Outlook) and

interfacing with a server-based CRM business solution.

07/2000–04/2001 IT Engineer (Military Service), Technical School of German Air Force I, Germany.

Assisted administration of a 500+ PC network and provided hardware/software/user support.

09/1996–08/1999 Telecommunications Electronics Engineer (Certified Apprentice), Deutsche

Telekom, Kempten, Germany.

Trained on and engineered electronic circuits, microprocessors and electronic boards.

Installed and maintained telecommunication and computer networks and developed software.

Education

07/2010–present PhD in Electronic Engineering/Computer Science, Multimedia and Vision Re-

expect. 07/2014 search Group, School of EECS, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK.

Primary research fields: Computer Vision, Machine Learning/Pattern Recognition, Multime-

dia Information Retrieval and Data Analysis/Mining.

Thesis topic: Context-based Semi-supervised Joint People Recognition in Photo Collections

using Markov Networks. Conducting further research on Social Event Detection, Retrieval

and Classification in Collaborative Photo Collections.

Researcher in 3-year European Union-funded research project CUbRIK on Machine, Human

and Social Computation for Multimedia Search and involving 15 institutions from 8 countries.

Key representative at quarterly project meetings throughout Europe and co-organizer of

project meeting in London.

08/2008–08/2009 Master of Computing in Computer Science, The Australian National University,

Canberra, Australia.

GPA 3.75. Coursework in Computer Vision, Machine Learning/Pattern Recognition, Data

Mining, Algorithms and Parallel Systems.

09/2006–01/2007 Coursework in Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley Extension,

Berkeley, USA.

Courses in Digital Signal Processing and Linux/UNIX Shell Programming.

03/2001–04/2004 Dipl.-Ing. in Media Comp. Science, Stuttgart Media University, Stuttgart, Ger..

GPA 3.87; graduated in 3 years (average is over 4 years).

Coursework in Design Patterns, Distributed Systems, Networks, Internet Security, Operating

Systems, Databases, Image Processing, Audiovisual Technologies and Document Processing.

Skills

Machine Learning Classification, Markov Networks, Ensemble of Decision Trees, SVM, SGD, Cluster-

and Data Analysis ing, K-Means, Dimensionality Reduction, Preprocessing, Multimodal Fusion, Model

Selection, Quantitative Evaluation, Association Rule Mining, Gamification, scikit-learn.

Computer Vision Face and Object Detection and Recognition, Visual Feature Extraction (LBP, SIFT,

HOG, MPEG-7), Segmentation, OpenCV, scikit-image.

NLP Semantic Topic Modeling, Tokenizing, Bag-of-Words, TF-IDF, Hashing, Matching.

Scientific Comp. Python, NumPy, SciPy, Matlab, C++, R, stream/map-reduce distributed computing.

Data Storage NoSQL, MongoDB, JSON, HDF5, SPARQL, RDF, SQL, sqlite, XML.

Web HTML, REST, AJAX, JavaScript, Dojo, Bootstrap, Flask/Tornado server.

Others Java, Git, SVN, GNU tools, Linux.

Languages English (fluent), German (mother tongue).

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Participation

Research Project Key representative for 10 project meetings throughout Europe between 2011 and 2014.

Conferences and Gave 19 oral slide show presentations in front of 20 to 300 people and presented

Workshops research at ACM ECIR 2014 in Amsterdam, ACM ICMR 2014 in Glasgow, ACM MMM

2014 in Dublin, MediaEval 2013 in Barcelona, IEEE MMSP 2013 in Pula, IEEE ICME

2013 in San Jose, IEEE WIAMIS 2013 in Paris, IEEE FG 2013 in Shanghai, ACM

MMM 2013 in Huangshan, MediaEval 2012 in Pisa, ACM ICMR 2012 in Hong Hong,

ACM MM 2011 in Scottsdale, MediaEval 2011 in Pisa.

Summer Schools Computer Vision and Machine Learning 2013 in Paris, Social Media Modeling and

Search 2012 in Santorini, Social Media Retrieval 2011 in Antalya.

Seminars Attended 35+ distinguished lecture seminars and 17 research-developing seminars.

Selected Scientific Publications

People M. Brenner, T. Avraham, M. Lindenbaum and E. Izquierdo. Temporal Face Embedding and

Recognition Propagation in Photo Collections. To appear in IEEE ICIP, 2014.

M. Brenner, N. Mirza and E. Izquierdo. People Recognition using Gamified Ambiguous

Feedback. In ACM ECIR GamifIR, 2014.

M. Brenner and E. Izquierdo. Joint People Recognition across Photo Collections using Sparse

Markov Random Fields. In ACM MMM, 2014.

M. Brenner and E. Izquierdo. People Recognition In Ambiguously Labeled Photo Collections.

In IEEE ICME, 2013.

M. Brenner and E. Izquierdo. Recognizing People by Face and Body in Photo Collections. In

IEEE FG, 2013.

M. Brenner and E. Izquierdo. Mining People’s Appearances To Improve Recognition in Photo

Collections. In ACM MMM, 2013.

Social Event M. Brenner and E. Izquierdo. Multimodal Detection, Retrieval and Classification of Social

Detection Events in Web Photo Collections. In ACM ICMR SEWM, 2014.

M. Brenner and E. Izquierdo. Social Event Detection and Retrieval in Collaborative Photo

Collections. In ACM ICMR, 2012.

Personal Interests and Activities

Photography, Hiking, Travel, Electronic Keyboard Playing, Soccer, Bicycling, Running.

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