Siegfried Schwartz

Bio

I am a doctoral student at the Institute of Neuroinformatics at ETH Zurich, supervised by Prof. Dr. Benjamin F. Grewe. My research interests revolve around how learning systems can acquire structured representations of their environments and use them for flexible behaviour and planning. In particular, I am interested in world models, energy-based approaches such as predictive coding networks, and the learning of compositional representations. Before starting my PhD, I completed my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Computer Science at TU Wien. During my studies, I gained research experience in computational neuroscience in Friedemann Zenke’s lab at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research (FMI) in Basel and in the Zimmer Lab at the University of Vienna, studying neural network dynamics and behaviour. Alongside my studies, I gained industry and academic teaching experience through several internships and part-time positions. For my Master’s thesis, I joined the Institute of Neuroinformatics, where I worked with Benjamin Grewe and Sander de Haan on biologically plausible replay methods for continual learning. Outside the lab, I enjoy hiking and exploring the Swiss mountains.