Teaching
Teaching students to build AI systems, not just study them
Between 2019 and 2022 at the University of Passau, I taught across deep learning, information retrieval, and systems engineering, while supervising master's thesis students through their own research projects.
Courses Taught
Four courses, one throughline: applied AI
CORE AI
Deep Learning
University of Passau, 2019 – 2022
From the foundations of neural networks through CNNs, RNNs, and transformer architectures, with hands-on labs building and training models rather than just reading about them.
INFORMATION RETRIEVAL
Preference-Based Information Retrieval
University of Passau, 2019 – 2022
Ranking, relevance, and evaluation: how retrieval systems learn from preferences and feedback, covering classical IR models alongside learning-to-rank methods.
WEB & SYSTEMS
Web Science
University of Passau, 2019 – 2022
The structure and dynamics of the web as a research subject — crawling, search engines, link analysis, and the social and technical graphs that hold it together.
SYSTEMS THINKING
Complex Engineering Systems
University of Passau, 2019 – 2022
Designing and reasoning about large-scale software and AI systems, where individual components are simple but their interactions are not.
Thesis Supervision
Guiding students through their own research
Alongside teaching, I supervised master's thesis students at the University of Passau, working with them from problem formulation through experiment design and writing. Most projects sat at the intersection of NLP, information retrieval, and applied machine learning, the same areas where I supervise and mentor today.
Teaching Philosophy
Theory in service of building things
I learned to code by building, not just reading, and I teach the same way: every concept gets paired with something a student can implement, break, and fix themselves. The goal isn't to produce people who can recite an architecture diagram — it's to produce people who can debug one at 2 a.m. when it actually matters.
Looking Ahead
Courses I'd be glad to teach next
As I move toward a faculty role, I'm looking forward to extending this teaching into the areas my research has grown into since 2022.