About Me

Hi there! My name is Teo. I am a Data Science graduate and since the end of 2021 a passionate PhD candidate in the field of explainable AI, aka XAI, at Berliner Hochschule für Technik. Whenever I'm not working, I'm either dancing or teaching Salsa Cubana, playing table tennis or cooking a delicious meal :^)

Resume

PhD Candidate, BHT

2021 - ongoing, BHT

eXplainable AI, Fine Grained Image Analysis, Computer Vision, Deep Learning
Under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Felix Bießmann and Prof. Dr. Frank Haußer.

Research Assistant at KInsecta, BHT

2020 - 2021, BHT

Responsible for developing and validating ML models (in Python, TensorFlow) for recognizing and hierarchically classifying insect species based on their wingbeat frequencies (see project page).

Working Student, GFaI

2018 - 2020

Responsible for developing and applying standard ML methods in C++ for classifying iron particles on microscopic images (see website).

M.Sc. Data Science, BHT

2018 - 2021

Link to my Master's thesis.

Internship, Fraunhofer IPK Berlin

2018

Department for 3D-Printing: written a web app in JavaScript and PHP for supervising the 3D-printing process. See website

Tutor for Analysis and Linear Algebra, BHT

2016 - 2020

B.Sc. Applied Mathematics, Berliner Hochschule für Technik (BHT)

2015 - 2018

B.A. Linguistics, Humboldt University Berlin

2013 - 2015

Publications

Data-driven Modeling of Combined Sewer Systems for Urban Sustainability: An Empirical Evaluation

Vipin Singh, Tianheng Ling, Teodor Chiaburu, Felix Bießmann
Presented at the German Conference of Artificial Intelligence 2024, Würzburg

We present a comprehensive empirical evaluation of several state-of-the-art time series models for predicting sewer system dynamics in a large urban infrastructure, utilizing three years of measurement data. We especially investigate the potential of Deep Learning models to maintain predictive precision during network outages by comparing global models, which have access to all variables within the sewer system, and local models, which are limited to data from a restricted set of local sensors.

Confident Teacher, Confident Student? A Novel User Study Design for Investigating the Didactic Potential of Explanations and their Impact on Uncertainty

Teodor Chiaburu, Frank Haußer, Felix Bießmann
Presented at ECML 2024, AIMLAI Workshop, Vilnius

We propose an experimental design to evaluate the potential of XAI in human-AI collaborative settings as well as the potential of XAI for didactics. In a user study with 1200 participants we investigate the impact of explanations on human performance on a challenging visual task - annotation of biological species in complex taxonomies. Paper available soon.

Uncertainty in XAI: Human Perception and Modeling Approaches

Teodor Chiaburu, Frank Haußer, Felix Bießmann
Published in Machine Learning and Knowledge Extraction (MAKE), 2024

We review established and recent methods to account for uncertainty in ML models and XAI approaches and we discuss empirical evidence on how model uncertainty is perceived by human users of XAI systems. We summarize the methodological advancements and limitations of methods and human perception. Finally, we discuss the implications of the current state of the art in model development and research on human perception. We believe highlighting the role of uncertainty in XAI will be helpful to both practitioners and researchers and could ultimately support more responsible use of AI in practical applications. Download paper here.

CoProNN: Concept-based Prototypical Nearest Neighbors for Explaining Vision Models

Teodor Chiaburu, Frank Haußer, Felix Bießmann
Presented at WCXAI 2024, Valletta

We present a novel approach that enables domain experts to quickly create concept-based explanations for computer vision tasks intuitively via natural language. Leveraging recent progress in deep generative methods we propose to generate visual concept-based prototypes via text-to-image methods. These prototypes are then used to explain predictions of computer vision models via a simple k-Nearest-Neighbors routine. The approach can be evaluated offline against the ground-truth of predefined prototypes that can be easily communicated also to domain experts as they are based on visual concepts. All the code and experiments can be found in our repository. Download paper here.

Interpretable Time Series Models for Wastewater Modeling in Combined Sewer Overflows

Teodor Chiaburu, Felix Bießmann
Presented at ISCSI 2023, Lisbon

In this work we specifically address the problem of sewage water polluting surface water bodies after spilling over from rain tanks as a consequence of heavy rain events. We investigate to what extent state-of-the-art interpretable time series models can help predict such critical water level points, so that the excess can promptly be redistributed across the sewage network. Our results indicate that modern time series models can contribute to better waste water management and prevention of environmental pollution from sewer systems. All the code and experiments can be found in our repository. Download paper here.

Low Cost Machine Vision for Insect Classification

Ingeborg Beckers, Danja Brandt, Teodor Chiaburu, Frank Haußer, Henning Schmidt, Ilona Schrimpf, Alexandra Stadel, Martin Tschaikner
Published in NaturschutzDigital – Künstliche Intelligenz im Naturschutz Forschung, Praxis und Leitplanken, 2023

In this work, we present an imaging method as part of a multisensor system developed as a low-cost, scalable, open-source system that is adaptable to classical trap types. The image quality meets the requirements needed for classification in the taxonomic tree. Illumination and resolution have been optimized and motion artefacts suppressed. The system is evaluated exemplarily on a dataset consisting of 16 insect species of the same as well as different genus, family and order. We demonstrate that standard CNN-architectures like ResNet50 (pretrained on iNaturalist data) or MobileNet perform very well for the prediction task after re-training. Smaller custom-made CNNs also lead to promising results. Download issue here.

Multisensor Data Fusion for Automatized Insect Monitoring

Martin Tschaikner, Danja Brandt, Henning Schmidt, Felix Bießmann, Teodor Chiaburu, Ilona Schrimpf, Thomas Schrimpf, Alexandra Stadel, Frank Haußer, Ingeborg Beckers
Presented at SPIE Remote Sensing 2023, Amsterdam

This paper presents a multisensor approach that uses AI-based data fusion for insect classification. The system is designed as low-cost setup and consists of a camera module and an optical wingbeat sensor as well as environmental sensors to measure temperature, irradiance or daytime as prior information. Download paper here.

Towards ML Methods for Biodiversity: A Novel Wild Bee Dataset and Evaluations of XAI Methods for ML-Assisted Rare Species Annotations

Teodor Chiaburu, Felix Bießmann, Frank Haußer
Presented at CVPR 2022, XAI Workshop, New Orleans

Classification and XAI Experiments on a dataset of wildbee photos. Visit repository (link to paper, poster and dataset there).

Projects

KInsecta and beexplainable

Investigating interpretability in ML neural networks trained to recognize wildbee species on images. Visit KInsecta website.

RIWWER

Reduction of the Impact of untreated Waste Water on the Environment in case of torrential Rain

Visit project website.

Talks

Die KI bewirbt sich als Lehrkraft

Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften 2024, BHT

Explanations from Humans for Humans: The Potential of Transparent AI for Trust Calibration and Didactics

Einstein Center Digital Future 2023, Berlin

Das Summen der Pixel: Versteht die KI, was eine Biene ist?

re:publica 2022, Berlin

Vertrau mir, wenn du kannst: Ein Blick in die Black Box der KI

Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften 2022, BHT

Teaching

Summer Term 2023, BHT

  • Machine Learning Lab (Bachelor Media Informatics)
  • Numerical Analysis 2 (Bachelor Applied Maths)

Winter Term 2022/23, BHT

  • Python for Data Science (Master Data Science)
  • Numerical Analysis 1 (Bachelor Applied Maths)

Summer Term 2022, BHT

  • Machine Learning Lab (Master Information and Communication Engineering)
  • Machine Learning Lab (Bachelor Media Informatics)

Winter Term 2021/22, BHT

  • Co-supervision Bachelor's Thesis: Machine Learning Methods for the Localization and Classification of Insects in Images, by Mr. Philipp Zettl