Hi, I’m Max! I’m a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University and the Instituto Técnico de Lisboa through the CMU Portugal program, advised by João Paulo Costeira, Joana Mendonça, and Jon Peha. My research uses natural language processing to support the enforcement of consumer protection and antitrust law.

Before that, I studied Marine and Maritime Robotics in Lisbon, Portugal and Toulon, France, where I had the opportunity to do fieldwork on Svalbard, as well as on the Azores. During my undergrad I helped create the individual study program Mechanical Engineering — Mechatronics at the Technical University of Vienna, where I mainly focused on machine design and controls engineering.

Outside of research, I boulder, cycle, and chip away at learning Portuguese. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions!

• Trajectory Prediction of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for image stabilization of a telescope system as Bachelor Thesis. I researched state of the art methods and implemented a program to improve on the previous system using Kalman Filters, OpenCV and C++.
• fish classification using CNNs – This project involves using CNNs and PyTorch to classify fish images into different categories. We will train a model on a dataset of fish images and use it to predict the class of new, unseen images. Finally its performance is compared to a fine-tuned AlexNet and a MobileNet to explore Transfer Learning.
• detecting sailboats at sea – A Faster R-CNN is trained to detect and categorize maritime objects, such as sailboats and buoys, at sea. Each detection is visualised with a bounding box and relevant metrics are displayed next to the image category. For this purpose images are filtered from the Pascal VOC for training.
• Transmission Box – Design, Calculations and Dimensioning of a Transmission Box, clutches and roll for roll forming according to DIN and ISO standards. As the team leader I was responsible for the calculations and design of parts of the transmission as well as the hydraulically actuated multi-plate clutch and for project management.

const max = {
  code: ["Python", "C++", "C", "Java"],
  technologies: ["AWS", "REST APIs", "CATIA", "3D Printing", "STM32"],
  languages: {
    German: "C2",
    English: "C2",
    Chinese: "HSK 4 eq. B2",
    French: "B2", 
    Spanish: "B1/B2"
  }
}