Jan Sobotka

While still in high school, working in fast food restaurants and web development agencies, I realized how much human work is repetitive and unfulfilling. This led me to self-study machine learning and a bachelor's degree with a focus on artificial intelligence at FIT CTU in Prague.

During the first two years of my studies, I worked as an AI/ML developer at Generali Česká pojišťovna, which gave me a deeper insight into the problems of existing machine learning techniques. Observing these limitations and my fascination with neuroscience and human reasoning motivated my current interest in researching AI methods. In addition to two open science projects with machine learning overlaps into biology, an undergraduate thesis using machine learning to decode brain signals, and an internship at a Swiss computational neuroscience lab, I published papers during my undergraduate studies at AAAI-24 and ICAART 2024 exploring techniques for accelerating the training of neural networks.

I view machine learning not only as a tool for automation and statistics, but also as a constructive approach to better understand cognitive processes, both our own and other life forms. This requires a combination of disciplines ranging from philosophy and cognitive science to mathematics and computer science, in which I plan to develop during my master's degree in computer science at EPFL in Switzerland.