Research and teaching information

My research interest is located in between artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and computational neuroscience. Here, I aim to understand the computational principles underlying brain function but also to utilise them in developing AI systems. In particular, I study the processes and mechanisms in the brain that form representations in temporally dynamic composition and decomposition as well as in multi-modal integration. As a central approach, I develop computational cognitive models such as artificial neural networks with plausible timescale mechanisms and probabilistic learning schemes on tasks and phenomena in music and language processing, neurodiversity, and cognitive development. These models have practical applications in machine learning, natural language processing, and data science as inductive biases in AI frameworks, and implications for cognitive science as priors and constraints in models of sequence generation, sequence prediction, and compositionality.

Publications

https://stefanheinrich.net/publications/

Curriculum

• 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 training

• 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