Florian Schneider

Florian Schneider

he/him

3rd and final year PhD Student

Researching on the applications and limitations of multimodal transformer encoder and decoder models.

About me

Hi, I’m Florian 👋🏼

I’m a passionate computer scientist whose journey began back in 2005 when I first got in touch with archaic MS-DOS batch programming. 16 years later, in the summer of 2021, I graduated with an M.Sc. at the University of Hamburg.

Since October 2021, I started working as a research assistant at the Language Technology (LT) group under the supervision of Chris Biemann.

I started officially as a PhD Student in April 2024 and expect to graduate in the summer of 2025.

Alongside my academic work, I completed two PhD research internships in industry:

  • From May 2022 to August 2022, I was a research intern at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, NY, USA under the supervision of Alfio Gliozzo. The work resulted in a first-author publication at K-CAP’23 on Ontology Alignment.
  • From November 2023 to March 2023, I was a research intern at Microsoft Research in Bangalore, India, under the supervision of Sunayana Sitaram. The work resulted in a first-author publication at EMNLP’24 on benchmarking VLMs for low-resource languages.

Recently, I started collaborating with Anne Lauscher and her Data Science group at the University of Hamburg on projects related to cultural bias in multimodal models.

Research Interests 🧐

During my studies, I found keen interest and amazement in Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, and the intersection of both: Multimodal Machine Learning. This is now my active research field.

More specifically, I am interested in:

  • Cross-Modal Information Retrieval and Representation Learning using multimodal transformer encoder models
  • Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) for low-resource languages and underrepresented cultures
  • Developing scientific tools and apps supporting multimodal data, such as text, image, audio, and video.
  • Applying Machine Learning in interdisciplinary projects, e.g., Digital Humanities (DH) or Computational Social Science, to enhance their research processes.

Awards ✨

GSCL 2021-2023 Award for The Best Master’s Thesis

Every two years, GSCL awards two prizes worth € 400 each for the best student undergraduate thesis and for the best master’s thesis in the field of language technology and computational linguistics. (see News Article)