Vincent Becker, M.Sc.

Short curriculum vitae

I am a PhD student in the Distributed Systems Group at ETH Zurich under the supervision of Prof. Friedemann Mattern. I joined the group in April 2016. Before, I received both my M.Sc. and B.Sc. in Computer Science from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany. During my studies I stayed at Carnegie Mellon University, US, from October 2013 until February 2014, to compose my Bachelor's thesis. Furthermore, I stayed at LIAAD, INESC TEC in Porto, Portugal, from September 2015 until March 2016 to do my Master's thesis.

Research interests

My research at ETH Zurich focuses in general on machine learning and data mining.

• Previously, I worked on estimating potential savings in heating energy using occupancy detection to determine whether a household is occupied.
• Now, I am interested in the field of interactions with smart devices. This includes, e.g., object detection from a video stream on mobile devices, gesture-based control of devices, etc.

Teaching

• HS 2016 Distributed Systems as teaching assistant
• FS 2017 Informatik II (D-ITET) as co-head teaching assistant
• HS 2017 Distributed Systems as teaching assistant
• FS 2018 Informatik II (D-ITET) as head teaching assistant. Current class website here
• HS 2018 Informatik I (D-BAUG) as teaching assistant

Supervised student projects

Publications

• Vincent Becker, Pietro Oldrati, Liliana Barrios, Gábor Sörös
  TouchSense: Classifying Finger Touches and Measuring their Force with an Electromyography Armband.
  Proceedings of the the International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC 2018). ACM, pp. 1–8, Singapore, October 2018
  doi: 10.1145/3267242.3267250
  Abstract, BibTeX, Paper (.pdf)
  For the code, go to https://github.com/vincentbecker/TouchSense
  
  
• Vincent Becker, Wilhelm Kleiminger, Vlad Coroama, Friedemann Mattern
  Estimating the Savings Potential of Occupancy-based Heating Strategies.
  Energy Informatics. DACH+ Energieinformatik 2018 Vol. 1, No. 1, Springer, pp. 1–20, October 2018
  doi: 10.1186/s42162-018-0022-6
  Abstract, BibTeX, Paper (.pdf)
  Best paper runner-up award
  
  
• Vincent Becker
  Augmented Humans Interacting with an Augmented World.
  Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI 2018). ACM, pp. 1–2, Barcelona, Spain, September 2018
  doi: 10.1145/3236112.3236179
  Abstract, BibTeX, Paper (.pdf)
  
  
• Vincent Becker, Wilhelm Kleiminger
  Exploring zero-training algorithms for occupancy detection based on smart meter measurements.
  Computer Science - Research and Development. DACH+ Energieinformatik 2017 Vol. 33, No. 1, Springer, ISBN 1865-2042, pp. 25–36, February 2018
  doi: 10.1007/s00450-017-0344-9
  Abstract, BibTeX, Paper (.pdf)
  This is a postprint version. Please find the published article here.
  
  
• Vincent Becker, Pietro Oldrati, Liliana Barrios, Gábor Sörös
  TouchSense: Classifying and Measuring the Force of Finger Touches with an Electromyography Armband.
  Proceedings of the 9th Augmented Human International Conference. AH '18, ISBN 978-1-4503-5415-8, pp. 34:1–34:3, 2018
  doi: 10.1145/3174910.3174947
  Abstract, BibTeX, Paper (.pdf)
  
  
• Vincent Becker, Wilhelm Kleiminger, Friedemann Mattern
  Automatically Estimating the Savings Potential of Occupancy-based Heating Strategies.
  pp. 1–47, December 2017
  doi: 10.3929/ethz-b-000219545
  Abstract, BibTeX, Paper (.pdf)
  This is a preprint version of an article submitted for publication.
  
  
• Vincent Becker, Mihai Bâce, Gábor Sörös
  Wearable machine learning for recognizing and controlling smart devices.
  Proceedings of the Workshop on Object Recognition for Input and Mobile Interaction at the 19th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI 2017). ACM, pp. 1–3, Vienna, Austria, September 2017
  Abstract, BibTeX, Paper (.pdf)
  
  
• Mihai Bâce, Philippe Schlattner, Vincent Becker, Gábor Sörös
  Facilitating Object Detection and Recognition through Eye Gaze.
  Proceedings of the Workshop on Object Recognition for Input and Mobile Interaction at the 19th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI 2017). ACM, Vienna, Austria, September 2017
  Abstract, BibTeX, Paper (.pdf)
  
  

• Energy Spotlight Article: Estimating the Savings Potential of Smart Household Thermostats

Former students

• Christian Mnuk (now Master's student at ETH)
• Erfan Abdi (now at Google Zurich)
• Maximilian Wurm (now at Venios GmbH)
• Pietro Oldrati (now Master's student at ETH)
• Linus Fessler
• Felix Rauchenstein (now at infix development GmbH)
• Alexander Kayed (now at OneOffix)

Activities

• June 2016 - I attended the IfI summer school 2016 in Zurich.
• September 2016 - I attended Ubicomp 2016 in Heidelberg.
• June 2017 - I attended the UBISS summer school 2017 in Oulu.
• September 2017 - I attended MobileHCI 2017 in Vienna.
• September 2018 - I attended Augmented Human 2018 in Seoul.
• August 2018 - I attended the ACM SIGCHI Summer School on Computational Interaction 2018 in Cambrige, UK.
• September 2018 - I attended MobileHCI 2018 in Barcelona.
• October 2018 - I attended Ubicomp/ISWC 2018 in Singapore.

Other

I was a reviewer for Energieinformatik 2017, ACM SAC 2017 (Data Streams track), the Machine Learning Journal (Springer), ACM SAC 2016, IEEE TKDE and FCT 2016.