Multimodal Interactive Systems
Departement of Computer Science
Darmstadt University of Technology

Dr.-Ing. Nicky Kern

Post-Doc in Computer Science

Research Interests

I'm interested in context-aware applications in general, especially in wearable computers. Therefore I try to extract context information using sensors (currently acceleration and audio) and use it for different applications. I'm especially interested in the link between sensing and the final application. Sensing reveals only uncertain information. The application has to take this uncertainty into account. I used context information for annotating Meeting Recordings and for mediating notifications for a wearable computer.

Education

Dr.-Ing.,
TU Darmstadt, July 2005
Download my PhD: 72 dpi (2.3 MB) or 300 dpi (3.5 MB)

Dipl.-Informatik Ingenieur ETH (M.Sc. in Computer Science),
ETH Zürich, July 2001

Institut Eurecom, Sophia Antipolis, France,
Specialization in Multimedia Communications

Experience

Departement of Computer Science, TU Darmstadt, PostDoc, before Teaching/Research Assistant
Course: Human Computer Systems

Intel Research Seattle, USA, Research Intern June-September 2004
Activity Recognition from multiple, different body-worn sensors.

Departement of Computer Science, ETH Zürich , Teaching Assistant
Course: Informatik I (Basic Computer Science), 1st semester; Sparc-System-Level Programming, 3rd semester (2 times)

ELCA Informatique, Lausanne, Switzerland
Internship July-August 1999, Project:Web-Application for Administrative Purposes.
Internship July-August 2000, Ticketing Application on a PDA.

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Short Bio

Curriculum Vitae cv.pdf

Dr. Nicky Kern finished his PhD in Computer Science in July 2005 (pdf availabele soon). He works as a full-time researcher in the Multi-Modal Interactive Systems Group at Darmstadt University of Technology. He started his PhD in 2001 at ETH Zurich in the Perceptual Computing and Computer Vision Group (PCCV) also under Bernt Schiele. His research is on context modeling in a wearable computer.

Before starting his PhD, Nicky obtained his Dipl. Inf.-Ing. ETH (equivalent to a M.Sc.) from ETH Zürich in 2001. His diploma project was conducted in the Computer Graphics Laboratory under the supervision of Prof. Markus Gross on An Incremental and Progressive System for Streaming Point-based Data. During his studies Nicky passed one year in Sophia-Antipolis, France at the Institut Eurecom, where he specialized in multimedia communications.

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Publications

Towards Personalized Mobile Interruptibility Estimation,
Nicky Kern and Bernt Schiele. In 2nd International Workshop on Location- and Context-Awareness (LoCa 2006) [paper link]

Context Annotation for A Live Life Recording,
Nicky Kern, Albrecht Schmidt, Bernt Schiele. In Personal and Ubiquitous Computing [ to appear ] [paper link]

A hybrid discriminative/generative approach for modeling human activities,
Jonathan Lester, Tanzeem Choudhury, Nicky Kern, Gaetano Borriello, Blake Hannford. In International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2005 (IJCAI), Glasgow, United Kingdom, 2005. [ to appear ]

Towards improving trust in context-aware systems by displaying system confidence,
Stavros Antifakos, Nicky Kern, Adrian Schwaninger, Bernt Schiele. In MobileHCI, Salzburg, Austria, 2005. [ to appear ]

A Model for Human Interruptability: Experimental Evaluation and Automatic Estimation from Wearable Sensors,
Nicky Kern, Stavros Antifakos, Bernt Schiele, Adrian Schwaninger In 8th International Symposium on Wearable Computing (ISWC), Washington DC, USA, November 2004. [paper link], [project page]

Multi-Sensor Activity Context Detection for Wearable Computing,
Nicky Kern and Bernt Schiele, In European Symposium on Ambient Intelligence(EUSAI), Eindhoven, The Netherlands, November 2003. [paper link]

Towards an Inertial Sensor Network,
Kristof van Laerhoven, Nicky Kern, Hans-Werner Gellersen, and Bernt Schiele, In IEE EuroWearable 2003 (EuroWearable), Birmingham, UK, September 2003. [paper link]

Context-Aware Notifications for Wearable Computing,
Nicky Kern and Bernt Schiele, In 7th International Symposium on Wearable Computing (ISWC), New York, USA, October 2003. [paper link], [project page]

Wearable Sensing to Annotate Meeting Recordings,
Nicky Kern, Bernt Schiele, Holger Junker, Paul Lukowicz, and Gerhard Tröster In Personal and Ubiquitous Computing: Selected papers from the ISWC2002 Conference, 2003. [paper link], [project page]

Multi-Channel, Context-Aware Notification on Wearable Devices,
Nicky Kern, Bernt Schiele, In Workshop on Design and Evaluation of Notification Interfaces for Ubiquitous Computing, 4th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp), Gothenburg, October 2002 [paper link]

Wearable Sensing to Annotate Meeting Recordings,
Nicky Kern, Bernt Schiele, Holger Junker, Paul Lukowicz, In Proceedings International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC), Seattle, USA, October 2002 [paper link], [project page]

Relational Skeletons for Retrieval in Patent Drawings,
Benoit Huet, Gennarino Guarascio, Nicky Kern and Bernard Merialdo, Internation Conference on Image Processing 2001 (ICIP2001), Thessaloniki, Greece, October 2001. [paper link]