About Me

I am a Machine Learning professor at University of Bonn and the head of the Media Engineering Department at Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems (IAIS). My current research focus is based on statistical data mining in the context of representation learning for a variety of industry applications involving behavioral analytics, medical informatics, accounting,  digital forensics and text mining. 

My other websites:

• Fraunhofer IAIS: Media Engineering Department and Business Area Cognitive Business Optimization 

• University of Bonn: Applied Machine Learning Lab 

News:

• [August 2023]

  • I was appointed as a professor at University of Bonn. I will be heading the Applied Machine Learning Lab at the Bonn-Aachen International Center for Information Technology (b-it).

• [July 2022]

  • A joint work with the research group of Prof. Attenberger at the University Clinic Bonn and my group at Fraunhofer IAIS titled "Improving Intensive Care Chest X-Ray Classification by Transfer Learning and Automatic Label Generation" has been peer-reviewed and accepted to be presented at this years at the 30th European Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks in Belgium.

  • I presented our latest work towards building sustainable machine learning research on analog computers at the workshop on Continuous Time Methods for Machine Learning at the 39th International Conference on Machine Learning. See the paper in https://arxiv.org/pdf/2208.04365.pdf for more details.

• [May 2022]

  • A joint work with my colleagues from University Clinic Bonn on deep learning assisted liver cirrhosis detection has been published at Nature Scientific Reports (see pdf).

• [September 2021]

  • "Advances in Password Recovery Using Generative Deep Learning Techniques": The final version joint research work with the German Federal Police Office and my research group on deep learning based  password reconstruction (see our early work) is published in the proceedings of ICANN'21. The paper will be presented online on the 15.09.21 (See this link for the virtual session).  The draft of the paper is available here.

• [August 2021] 

  • My paper on extracting temporal behavioral representations using simple recurrent neural networks is published in this year's  proceedings of IEEE COG (see paper).

  • The second Game Analytics Workshop was a virtual event this time. We have had interesting talks from experts in the field. Thanks for all the speakers for their contributions!

• [April 2021] 

  • "Mining Media Data 2": The second course I have started teaching at the Bonn-Aachen International Center for Information Technology for the University of Bonn and RWTH Aachen students will also be entirely virtual this semester.

  • I am organizing the second iteration of the well received Game Analytics Workshop with my colleagues Anders Drachen and Simon Demediuk. This years workshop will take place in conjunction with the 16th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG) 2021 and will include tutorials, keynotes and paper presentations related to game analytics.  Check the workshop website for more details.

• [January 2021] 

  • Competitive digital gaming (or shortly Esports) is a substantially growing field with an over 500 millions of active participants and over 1 Billion USD market worth. Our joint work with my colleagues from University of York and Northwestern University on improved story telling for Esports is published to be presented in the Interactive Entertainment Conference 2021 (final draft can be downloaded from here).

• [December 2020] 

  • A technical report describing our latest research with the German Federal Police Office on Deep Learning based password generation is now online and available under https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.05685 (which can also be downloaded from here).

  • I will be chairing the Game Analytics and Visualization track of the 16th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG) 2021.

• [October 2020] 

  • "Mining Media Data": The course I have been teaching at the Bonn-Aachen International Center for Information Technology will also be entirely virtual this semester.

• [April 2020]

  • "Matrix and Tensor Factorization for Profiling Player Behavior": My recent book on behavioral profiling.

  • Due to COVID-19 our recently accepted paper titled "Retention Prediction in Sandbox Games with Bipartite Tensor Factorization" (see draft) will be presented online. 

  • "Mining Media Data": My course on introducing data mining for media applications for the Bonn-Aachen International Center for Information Technology students.

Contact me via Rafet.Sifa@bit.uni-bonn.de