Leuphana, University Lüneberg

Ulf Brefeld is a full Professor for Machine Learning at Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany. Prior to joining Leuphana, he was joint professor for Knowledge Mining & Assessment at TU Darmstadt, Germany, and at Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education (DIPF), Frankfurt am Main, Germany. His research interest is in the field of statistical machine learning covering a wide range of applications ranging from (deep) reinforcement/imitation learning (e.g., multi-agent coordination, sports analytics, recommendation and personalization), kernel machines, structured prediction and graphical models (e.g., learning analytics, user understanding) as well as geometrical approaches (convex hulls, flow-based generative models). 

In sports analytics, Ulf focuses on spatiotemporal problems and usually works with positional/tracking from professional soccer. He believes that data-driven movement models are key to analyzing positional data of all sorts and uses them as building blocks to address more sophisticated problems (e.g., XPass). In S-Training, he collaborated together with Claus Ekstrøm, Christophe Ley, and Hans Van Eetvelde on a novel measure to evaluate tournament predictions. He is also interested in spatiotemporal data from other sports (e.g., basketball, handball) or domains (e.g., human pose analyses).