Hi I’m Christian Koehler, a Senior Research Engineer in the Artificial Intelligence Center at Samsung Research America, California. I’m passionate about the intersection where Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Human Computer Interaction (HCI) meet. I’m interested in how insights derived from users and users’ data can empower the development of AI to build human-centric technology.
I have experience in a number of different areas from Applied Machine learning, over Rapid Prototyping to Survey design and interview studies. I developed deep learning algorithms and analyzed large scale data to derive descriptive statistics. I’m familiar with both quantitative and qualitative methods and I believe the best technology is being build with the user in mind from the ground up.
Over the last few years I have applied my expertise to a variety of problems that aimed to support people in their daily lives and make technology more accessible. Most recently I worked on projects to improve the performance of digital voice assistants by understanding user information need and collecting high quality rejection data for NLP-based rejection algorithms, use sentiment aspects from review data to recommend content and items to users, design and evaluate mixed initiative systems that derive a small number of actionable smart shortcuts on physical devices using pattern mining, and estimate a persons shopping location from large scale WiFi data. During my PhD work I created and thoroughly evaluated a system that modeled a persons indoor location in order to improve both thermal comfort and energy efficiency of heating/cooling systems. Throughout my work I utilized surveys, interviews, and statistics over large datasets to guide my development of new technology.
I received a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, where I was advised by faculty in CMU’s Human-Computer-Interaction Institute: Anind Dey, Jennifer Mankoff, and Ian Oakley. I received my German Diplom (MSc equivalent) in Computer Science with a specialization in Human Computer Interaction from RWTH Aachen University, Germany.