Education

Doctorate TU Munich, jointly with IDSIA (2011)
PhD in machine learning (dr. rer. nat.)
"Studies in Continuous Black-box Optimization"[26] (summa cum laude)
Advisor: Jürgen Schmidhuber.
Master's École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (2005)
MSc in computer engineering (dipl. ing. inf.)
"Evolving a Compact Concept-based Sokoban Solver"[1]
Advisors: Eric Baum and David Waltz.
Summer schools Cognitive Science and Machine Learning Summer School (Sardinia, 2010)
Advanced Scientific Programming in Python Winter School (Warsaw, 2010)
Machine Learning Summer School (Cambridge, 2009)
Exchange years Columbia University (2004-2005)
University of Waterloo (2002-2003)
Secondary ed.

Lycée Classique de Diekirch (2000)

Awards and grants

2012 Postdoctoral Fellowship
National Research Fund Luxembourg
2011 PhD Challenge
2011 Solomonoff Student Prize Conference of Artificial General Intelligence
2010

Kurzweil Best Paper Prize Conference of Artificial General Intelligence
2009 GECCO Best Paper Award
2000 International Mathematical Olympiad (South Korea)
Bronze medal
1996, 1997 Olympiade Mathématique Belge
Second price (twice)

Work experience

2011 - present New York Univeristy, Courant Institute, Vision Learning Group
Research scientist (PostDoc) with Yann LeCun
2007 - 2011 Swiss AI institute IDSIA
Graduate student researcher, with Jürgen Schmidhuber
2005 - 2007 Baum Research Enterprises
Research consulting (relevance based planning in complex problems)
2003 - 2004

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Teaching assistant for programming courses in Java and C++
Summer 2003

Société Européenne des Satellites

Summer 2001

Confédération Luxembourgeoise du Commerce

Professional service

Tutorial lectures IM-CLeVeR Workshop, Lugano, Switzerland (2011)
FACETS CodeJam Workshop, Marseille, France (2010)
PC member Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (2012)
European Workshop on Reinforcement Learning (2012)
Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (2010, 2011)
Conference on Artificial General Intelligence (2010, 2011)
Reviewer IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (2012)
Journal of Machine Learning Research (2010, 2011)
Neural Information Processing Systems (2011)
Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (2011)
Local organizer Conference on Artificial General Intelligence (2010)
Support staff Civilian European Land Robot Trial (2007)