Our New MaD Man – Thomas Altstidl

Thomas, who grew up in the Bavarian alps near Berchtesgaden, received both his bachelor’s and master’s degree in computer science at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU). In April 2021 he joined the MaD team, where he is working to improve breast cancer prevention and treatment. Before that, he wrote his master thesis at the lab, implementing a novel technique to improve scale invariance of state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks (CNNs). His interest in computer vision dates back to his bachelor thesis, for which he compared multiple classification methods for recognizing geyser eruptions in webcam videos.

However, his research interests are generally quite diverse. During his time at the Fraunhofer Institute, he worked on indoor positioning systems (IPSs), evaluating compressive autoencoders to reduce bandwidth requirements. He also has experience in medical applications, having developed a hiker monitoring app together with his twin brother. Currently, he’s an active associate and developer for GeyserTimes, a nonprofit organization dedicated to unlocking the full potential of technology for geyser research. Besides machine learning, his other topics of interest include scientific computing, sensor networks, and computer graphics.