Join us

Thanks for your interest in our group! Why not consider joining the team? We are seeking students (at all levels) with strong quantitative backgrounds (computer science, mathematics, physics, …). You should be interested in working at the intersection of different fields and feel comfortable about writing code.

Since the group is still starting to establish itself, you have the unique opportunity to truly shape and influence things here.

While there is a lot of value in such endeavours, most of our projects are not leader-board science in that they do not have the explicit goal of beating all state-of-the-art methods. That is not to say that we are not interested in producing relevant methods or that leader-board science is bad, on the contrary: As Jimmy Lin outlines when describing his ideal intellectual ecosystem, this type of research is just what comes more naturally to him and his group. Our goals are different in that we want to produce excellent science based on methods whose performance we can explain and understand. This necessitates comprehensive comparisons with other methods, ablation studies, and many additional tricks to figure out what is going on. If this sounds enticing to you, we would love to hear from you!

To learn more about our working style, see this note for potential student collaborators and read our research guide.

Bachelor’s and master’s theses

If you are interested in writing your thesis with us, please send your CV, your transcript of records, and a brief cover letter stating your research interests to bastian@rieck.me. Your cover letter should provide answers to the following questions:

  1. Are there any research papers of the group that pique your interest specifically? (You do not have to be an expert in the topic yet, of course!)

  2. Are you more comfortable working empirically, i.e. lots of implementations, experiments, and so on, or working theoretically, i.e. lots of proofs, derivations, and more?

  3. When would you be available for working on the thesis?

Ph.D. positions

If you are interested in working with us, please reach out to bastian@rieck.me with (a) a brief motivation letter, (b) your CV, and (c) a full transcript of your grades. We value interdisciplinary, non-standard backgrounds and attention to detail.

Research visits

If you are interested in a short-term research opportunity, such as a research visit over the summer, please reach out to bastian@rieck.me with (a) a brief motivation letter in which you describe the purpose of the stay, (b) your CV, and (c) a suggestion for funding opportunities. We are particularly interested in stays that may result in long-term collaborations.