Oliver Brdiczka

Oliver Brdiczka focuses on constructing models for human activity from various sensors -- ranging from PC desktop events to physical activity sensors -- by employing machine learning methods. The goal? To enable context-aware applications and services that understand human activity and anticipate human needs by leveraging derived intent and goals. As part of a Xerox-funded project incubated at PARC (www.meshstro.com) to increase the productivity of today's information workers, Oliver is developing methods for automatically constructing semantic models from people's work patterns using content, temporal patterns, and social relationships.

Oliver's background is in computer vision, situation modeling, and machine learning. Before joining PARC, he managed a research area on Ambient Collaborative Learning at Telecooperation Group at TU Darmstadt, Germany and, before that, he held a lecturer position at Universite Pierre Mendes France at Grenoble. Oliver's research has contributed to several European research projects including IST CAVIAR (Context Aware Vision using Image-based Active Recognition) and IP CHIL (Computers in the Human Interaction Loop), as well as the DARPA CALO project (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes).

Oliver received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and M.S. in Imagery, Vision, and Robotics from INP Grenoble; engineer's diploma from ENSIMAG, France; and Master's Degree in Computer Science (Diplom-Informatiker) from Universitaet Karlsruhe (TH), Germany. Oliver has authored or co-authored more than 40 peer-reviewed publications in the fields of activity recognition, context modeling, machine learning, human-computer interaction, and e-learning, and also serves on numerous program committees for international conferences. He received the best Ph.D. thesis award from INP Grenoble (2007) as well as best paper awards from the IFIP conference on Artificial Intelligence, Applications, & Innovations (2006) and the IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (2008).