Steinar Laenen

Steinar Laenen

PhD Candidate Computer Science

University of Edinburgh

Biography

I am a final-year PhD student at the University of Edinburgh’s School Informatics, where I am supervised by Dr. He Sun. My research focuses on developing clustering algorithms for graphs, using techniques from spectral graph theory. During my PhD I spent three months (Aug-Oct 2024) as a student researcher in Google’s Operations Research team.

Before my PhD I was a research intern at Five in their Oxford research group, where I worked on few-shot learning together with Dr. Luca Bertinetto

I received my MSc in Artificial Intelligence graduate (with distinction) from the University of Edinburgh. For my thesis I received the Joint AI MSc Dissertation Prize, awarded to 2 out of 200+ students. I did my bachelors (summa cum laude) in mathematics and computer science at Amsterdam University College.

Education
  • PhD in Computer Science, 2021 - present

    University of Edinburgh

  • MSc in Artificial Intelligence, 2018 - 2019

    University of Edinburgh

  • BSc in Liberal Arts and Science, Maths and Computer Science, 2015 - 2018

    Amsterdam University College

Experience

 
 
 
 
 
Google
Student Researcher
Aug 2024 – Oct 2024 Cambridge, MA, USA
 
 
 
 
 
FiveAI
Research Intern
Dec 2019 – Dec 2020 Oxford, UK
Researched few-shot learning for image classification at FiveAI`s Oxford research group, which has close ties to the Torr Vision Group at Oxford University. The work I did together with Luca Bertinetto resulted in a contributed talk at the NeurIPS 2020 Meta Learning workshop, and a NeurIPS 2021 paper.
 
 
 
 
 
Warm Arctic
Summer Intern
Jul 2018 – Aug 2018 Reykjavik, Iceland
I worked on a project where we used drones equipped with RGB and infrared cameras to create orthomosaic maps of areas that contain geothermal lineaments. I developed an anomaly detection tool to automatically detect areas of geothermal importance using deep autoencoders and a one-class SVM. This work got published at the Stanford workshop on Geothermal Reservoir Engineering.
 
 
 
 
 
University of Reykjavik
Software Engineering Intern
Jul 2017 – Aug 2017 Reykjavik, Iceland
Worked on a project which aimed to research the importance of bodily cues in social interaction. The work consisted of designing and programming automated intelligent social behaviour for virtual agents in Unity3D and C#. Constructed complex social behaviours for virtual agents such as glancing, conversing, and gesticulating. This work got published at a virtual agents conference.