Whereas I have a very broad range of interests in machine learning and artificial intelligence, my personal focus within the group is the development and application of machine learning techniques in the domain of computer vision. My interest in this topic started to grow during the development of a classical object tracking system (CVTK) as part of my bachelor thesis. Subsequently, I studied the automatic construction and selection of optimal features using evolutionary and supervised learning. As part of my PhD-thesis and my present work, I'm working towards significantly increasing the learner's autonomy by adapting techniques of selforganization, deep learning and reinforcement learning. Besides this, I collected valuable experience with a broad range of machine learning techniques in the context of several sponsored research & industrial projects, including statistical data analysis, data mining, time series prediction, reinforcement learning and regression / classification with neural networks and support vector machines.