Kristof Van Laerhoven (Group Leader)

Contact

+49 61511664220

+49 6151166229

kristof@ess.tu-da...

Office

S202|A309 , Office Hours: open door policy

Research Interests

Wearable Sensors, Activity Recognition, Wireless Sensor Networks, Machine Learning, Signal Processing

Teaching

See our education page for the full list including guest lectures.

Wireless Sensor Networks seminar 2007-now
Wireless Sensor Networks practicum 2007-now
Introduction in Computer Science 2 Summer 2007
Introduction in Computer Science 1 2007-2008

Short-Bio

I studied Latin-Sciences at College Essen (high school), got my 'Kandidaat' Computer Science degree at the University of Limburg (LUC) in 1997 and my 'Licentiaat' (M.Sc.) Computer Science degree at the University of Brussels (VUB) in 1999.
In Brussels, my main interests started to shift towards robotics and neural networks and I got plenty of that doing projects at Luc Steels' VUB AI lab, with Bernard Manderick supervising my Master's thesis "Adaptive Context Awareness".
After an internship at Starlab Research I stayed to work for two more years to do research with companies such as Nokia, Philips, and Epson, and working with/for Walter Van de Velde. (Starlab went famously bankrupt in 2001 but lives on).
Hans Gellersen then took me into the Embedded Interactive Systems group at the University of Lancaster in the United Kingdom, where I finished a PhD thesis in 2005 entitled "Embedded Perception".
In April 2006, I moved to the Technische Universität Darmstadt in Germany for a postdoc position with Bernt Schiele's Multimodal Interactive Systems group.
In summer 2009, I was granted an Emmy Noether Research Group by the German Research Foundation (DFG), on the theme of Long-Term Activity Recognition with Wearable Sensors, which started in 2010.
In winter 2012, I was appointed as guest professor ("Vetretung Lukowicz") in Embedded Systems at the University of Passau

Projects

Please visit this page for an overview of my projects, past and present. I worked on a large number of projects, funded by the European Commission (IST), the UK's EPSRC and DTI NextWave, Germany's DFG and a variety of industrial partners.

Students

I'm proud to have supervised these students with their Masters thesis (prior to heading the ESS group):

Alexander Crolla: Electronic Auditive Response (Hogeschool Antwerpen, Belgium) 2001
Gitte Robeyns: HEAR (Hogeschool Antwerpen, Belgium) 2001
Christian Decker: Routing in dynamic, arbitrarily and partially connected networks (University of Karlsruhe, Germany) 2001
Dikaios Papadogkonas: Investigation in Activity Recognition Algorithms on Embedded Platforms (University of Lancaster, UK) 2004
Martin Berchtold: Processing Sensor Data with CSTK (University of Karlsruhe, Germany) 2004
André Kvist Aronsen: Long-Term Fine-Grained Actigraphy [+slides] (TU Darmstadt, Germany) 2006
Eugen Berlin: Optimizing Wearable Sensors under Technical and Usability Constraints [+slides] (TU Darmstadt, Germany) 2007
Urs Glaubitt & Max Lehn: Analysis and Visualization of Circadian Rhythms from Actigraphy Data [+slides] (TU Darmstadt, Germany) 2007
Marko Borazio: Sustained Logging in Sleep Studies through Energy-Efﬁcient Actigraphy [+slides] (TU Darmstadt, Germany) 2008
David Kilian: User-Annotated Activity Data Gathering and Processing [+slides](TU Darmstadt, Germany) 2008
Jun Liu: An Evaluation of Activity Detection by Fusing RFID and Acceleration Data [+slides] (TU Darmstadt, Germany) 2008
Matthias Altmann: Characterizing Accelerometer Data for Evaluating Sports Activities [+slides] (TU Darmstadt, Germany) 2008
Delphine Christin François Philipp: Combining Localization and Activity Awareness through Wireless Connectivity of a Wearable Sensor [+ slides](TU Darmstadt, Germany) 2008

Master and PhD Students supervised more recently are listed on the ESS website under staff or alumni.

Program Committees

I am/was a Program Committee member (or chair) of the following events:
Eusai 2003, CAKES 2003 Lectures (organiser), Eusai 2004 (+demo chair), UbiComp 2004 workshops, ISWC 2004 student colloquium, IWSAWC 2005, MRC 2005, sOc/EuSAI 2005, ACM SAC 2006, IWSAWC 2006, UCS 2006, MRC 2006,ISWC 2006 (+dc chair), PTA 2006, ubiPCMM 2006 (co-chair), PerTec 2007, TEI 2007, ACM SAC 2007,IWSAWC 2007 (chair), HCIEd 2007, UASS 2007, EUROSSC 2007, CONTEXT 2007, USC 2007, ISWC 2007, ubiPCMM 2007,UCitO 2007, IOT 2008, Pervasive 2008, TEI 2008, ISWC 2008 (+workshops chair), EUROSSC 2008, MidSens 2008, PerCom 2009, Pervasive 2009, INSS 2009, TEI 2009, MidSens 2009, Ubicomp 2009 (poster chair), EuroSSC 2009, ISWC 2009, MUM 2009, CIOT 2010, INSS 2010, TEI 2010, ISAmI 2010, MobileHCI 2010, GameDays 2010, MidSens 2010, M&C 2010, MUM 2010, AmI 2010, ISWC 2010 (pc chair), NESEA 2010, TEI 2011 (associate chair) MCPT2011, ISWC 2011 (dc chair), AmI 2011 (workshop chair), CONTEXT'11, MobileHCI'11 (senior PC member), INSS 2011, NESEA 2011, MidSens 2011, TEI 2012 (associate chair), ISWC 2012, INSS 2012, IoT 2012, AwareCAST 2012, MUM 2012, ISWC 2013 (general chair), AH 2013, CONTEXT'13, SenseApp 2013, CONTEXT 2013, Recognize2Interact 2013, MUM 2013 (pc chair),

Funding review activities

external scientific promotor for the IWT-funded SensorTIP project
occasional evaluator/expert for the European Commission's IST program (Future and Emergent Technologies)
some review tasks for specialized funding organizations such as: the Hasler Stiftung, the IeMRC, etc.

Publications

Most of my papers are listed on my publications page. You can also try my Google Scholar Citations, Web of Knowledge, DBLP, CiteSeerX, the ACM Guide, IEEE XPlore, or Springer. My H-Index is 22, my i-10 index is 28 (last access, 2012).
Also, have a look at my research notes for unformatted sketches and intermediate research results.

Calendar

This calendar works only as an indication of when I might have time. Not every appointment I have is recorded here and things tend to regularly pop up at the last minute. Also possible, but less likely, is that appointments are cancelled. Just call or send me an email if you want to meet, that still works the best.