Research

My research interest is located at the intersection of artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and computational neuroscience, where I study how representations emerge and give rise to function in biological and artificial systems. Here, I aim to understand principles underlying representation learning as a unifying framework for understanding structure, abstraction, and generalisation in cognition and in AI. In particular, I study the processes and mechanisms in the brain and in computational models that form representations through spatial and temporal composition and decomposition, as well as through multimodal integration. My goal is to uncover how such representations arise from structural and geometric symmetries, how they enable behaviour, learning, and reasoning, and how individual differences and neurodiversity shape them. As a central approach, I develop computational cognitive models in the form of artificial neural systems with plausible mechanisms and probabilistic learning dynamics, focused on tasks and phenomena in reasoning, natural language processing, cognitive development, and biosignal inference. Understanding these representational mechanisms and processes provides inductive biases for machine learning and AI systems and yields priors and markers for cognitive science in models of compositionality, disentanglement, generation, and prediction.

Publications

https://stefanheinrich.net/publications/

Employments/positions

• since 01/2024, Associate Professor, Data Science Section, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark
• since 03/2022, Affiliate Researcher, Pioneer Centre for Artificial Intelligence, Denmark
• 11/2021–12/2023, Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark
• 03/2020–10/2021, Postdoctoral Fellow, International Research Center for Neurointelligence, The University of Tokyo, Japan
• 01/2020–10/2021, External Research Fellow, Knowledge Technology research group, Department of Informatics, Universität Hamburg, Germany
• 04/2016–12/2019, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Sonderforschungsbereich/Transregio Project TRR 169 Crossmodal Learning, Universität Hamburg, Germany, with Tsingua University Beijing, China
• 05/2010–03/2016, Research and Teaching Associate, Knowledge Technology research group, Department of Informatics, Universität Hamburg, Germany
• 06/2006–03/2010, Student Assistant, Polymer Engineering Institute, University of Paderborn, Germany
• 10/2003–10/2009, Studies in Computer Science and Psychology, University of Paderborn

Education and competencies

• 20.06.2016, Dr. rer. nat. (German PhD) in Computer Science at Universität Hamburg (Thesis), Germany
• 27.10.2009, Diplom-Informatiker (German MSc) at the University of Paderborn (Thesis), Germany