Dieter is an Assistant Professor in the Computing Science department at the University of Alberta and also leads a research group in the Empirical Inference department at the Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen, Germany. 

Dieter’s mission is to achieve human performance in athletic, rapidly changing, uncertain, and high-dimensional tasks with physical robots. His research group develops learning approaches for complex systems, like soft and muscular robots, which can excel in these demanding domains. The group also studies how the robotic body influences the acquisition of robotic skills.

He earned a PhD in Machine Learning and Robotics under Jan Peters and Bernhard Schölkopf at the MPI for Intelligent Systems. While pursuing his PhD, Dieter interned at X, the Moonshot Factory (formerly Google X). He holds an MSc in Biomedical Engineering from Imperial College London and a BEng in Information and Electrical Engineering from HAW Hamburg with generous support from Siemens.