Hi! 👋 My name is Johannes Roth and currently I’m pursuing a PhD in the field of computational cognitive neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognition and Brain Science in Leipzig, under the supervision of Martin Hebart.

Research interests

My PhD is primarily about making the data acquisition for large-scale vision fMRI studies (like in the THINGS initiative) more efficient. Right now, I’m investigating the optimal presentation rates for condition-rich fMRI studies, a pursuit that could drastically increase the amount of data we’re able to record in the limited time we all have with MRI scanners. Also, as we can’t record fMRI data to every existing image (which we would have to do for a complete coverage of the visual world), I’m interested in how we can select the images that are most informative for our research questions, especially in the context of encoding models of the visual system.

I’m also always open for input and ideas, just write me a mail if you want to talk!.

Academic background

I obtained my masters degree in computer science at Leipzig University, choosing courses on data science, machine learning, medical image processing and neuroscience. I had the great pleasure of also writing my masters thesis at the MPI CBS under the supervision of Martin and Katja Seeliger, where I researched methods for the generation of images that cause high activations in specific brain areas, using deep learning models of the human visual system. For my bachelors degree, I studied business information systems, also in Leipzig.

Work experience

During my studies I had multiple jobs as a working student, mostly as a data scientist. At Check24 I worked on their image processing and deduplication pipelines and also on optimizing their recommendation system. Before that, I worked on a more complex image deduplication system at Webdata Solutions, which later became the basis for a now approved research grant. I also had a stint as a data engineer at Mercateo, building ETL pipelines and assisting with building up a new data warehouse, as an intern at GISA, developing message transfer in ABAP and building an MVP for a new metering app, and as a teaching assistant for a bachelors course on distributed systems (for two semesters) and for a bachelors course on marketing.

Next to presenting myself to the world, this website also has the purpose of sharing my knowledge in a blog. As I’m currently reading alot of papers and learning a massive amount of new things, that I’m writing down anyway, I figured I might as well share it with the world! So take a look at my blog, if you like and maybe you’ll find something useful! 🙂