Hi there 👋

I’m Julius Mayer, a Machine Learning Researcher with a strong foundation in Cognitive Science (BSc) and Intelligent Adaptive Systems (MSc). I currently work as a PhD candidate in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) group at the Institute of Cognitive Science in Osnabrück, supervised by Prof. Elia Bruni, where I research language-driven interaction in physical environments.

Before this, I worked in industry on autonomous driving and face recognition. I have 10+ years of work experience in software development for machine learning and artificial intelligence, bridging research innovation with industry application.

I am currently finalizing my PhD dissertation and looking to explore new opportunities in impactful AI. Feel free to reach out regarding open roles or collaborations — I’m always happy to connect.

Awards & Talks

Nov ’25: Invited to present at EMNLP 2025, Suzhou, China
Oct ’25: Accepted for poster presentation at the BayLearn 2025 Symposium, Bay Area, USA
Aug ’25: Invited talk & poster presentation at the Berkeley LLM Agent Summit 2025, Berkeley, USA
Feb ’25: 🏆 2nd Place – Berkeley LLM Agent Hackathon 2024 Benchmarking Track (~3000 participants)
Oct ’23: Invited talk at the Computational Cognition Conference 2023, Osnabrück, Germany
May ’22: Invited talk at the EBRAINS Brain Simulation School, Palermo, Italy

Highlighted Projects

2025: Designed and developed iVISPAR, an interactive multi-modal benchmarking framework, evaluating the spatial reasoning capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs) acting as agents in dynamic, physics-based environments using Unity. iVISPAR supports visual 3D, 2D, and text-based input modalities, enabling comprehensive assessments of VLMs’ planning and reasoning skills.
2025: Collaborated on SPLICE, a human-curated benchmark of instructional videos probing temporal, causal, spatial, contextual, and knowledge-based reasoning. Evaluations show that state-of-the-art VLMs lag far behind humans, leaning heavily on language priors rather than visual understanding, especially in contextual and spatial tasks — highlighting key gaps in event-based visual reasoning.
2024: Supervised academic work within MicrocosmAI, including 13 thesis projects, 3 years of study-project coordination, and courses/seminars on emergent communication and multi-agent systems in physical environments.
2024: Designed, developed, and created content for the MicrocosmAI website.
2024: Founded and led MicrocosmAI, a research initiative focused on emergent communication and coordination in embodied multi-agent environments with MuJoCo.
2023: Implemented a computational framework to model cortical spike synchrony, demonstrating that spike synchrony reflects the Gestalt structure of the stimulus which can be interpreted as a mechanism for prior probability estimation.
2021: Machine Learning Engineer at Dermalog Identification Systems on face recognition R&D, developing unsupervised face quality prediction, and conducting evaluation and benchmarking.
2019: Developed a trajectory planning actor-critic agent for autonomous driving systems and contributed to AI projects utilizing LiDAR sensors as AI Research Intern (Master’s Thesis) at Ibeo Automotive Systems (now MicroVision).
2018: Researched human-robot interaction scenarios involving humanoid robots (iCub/NICO) and studied multisensory integration of sound and image data as a Student Research Assistant at the Knowledge Technology Group (WTM), Hamburg.
2015: Developed a distributed learning mechanism by evolving echo state networks via neuroevolution, optimizing a population of embodied agents for foraging and collision avoidance tasks. Demonstrated emergent intelligent exploration, adaptive behavior, and self-organizing intelligence in an agent-based system (Bachelor thesis).

2025: Designed and developed iVISPAR, an interactive multi-modal benchmarking framework, evaluating the spatial reasoning capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs) acting as agents in dynamic, physics-based environments using Unity. iVISPAR supports visual 3D, 2D, and text-based input modalities, enabling comprehensive assessments of VLMs’ planning and reasoning skills.
2025: Collaborated on SPLICE, a human-curated benchmark of instructional videos probing temporal, causal, spatial, contextual, and knowledge-based reasoning. Evaluations show that state-of-the-art VLMs lag far behind humans, leaning heavily on language priors rather than visual understanding, especially in contextual and spatial tasks — highlighting key gaps in event-based visual reasoning.

2024: Founded and led MicrocosmAI, a research initiative focused on emergent communication and coordination in embodied multi-agent environments with MuJoCo.
2023: Implemented a computational framework to model cortical spike synchrony, demonstrating that spike synchrony reflects the Gestalt structure of the stimulus which can be interpreted as a mechanism for prior probability estimation.
2015: Developed a distributed learning mechanism by evolving echo state networks via neuroevolution, optimizing a population of embodied agents for foraging and collision avoidance tasks. Demonstrated emergent intelligent exploration, adaptive behavior, and self-organizing intelligence in an agent-based system (Bachelor thesis).

2021: Machine Learning Engineer at Dermalog Identification Systems on face recognition R&D, developing unsupervised face quality prediction, and conducting evaluation and benchmarking.
2019: Developed a trajectory planning actor-critic agent for autonomous driving systems and contributed to AI projects utilizing LiDAR sensors as AI Research Intern (Master’s Thesis) at Ibeo Automotive Systems (now MicroVision).
2018: Researched human-robot interaction scenarios involving humanoid robots (iCub/NICO) and studied multisensory integration of sound and image data as a Student Research Assistant at the Knowledge Technology Group (WTM), Hamburg.

2024: Supervised academic activities within MicrocosmAI: 12 thesis projects, 3 years of study project management, and teaching courses.
2024: Designed, developed, and created content for the MicrocosmAI website.
2024: Founded and led MicrocosmAI, a research initiative focused on emergent communication and coordination in embodied multi-agent environments with MuJoCo.

Python C# MATLAB Java C++ Unity MuJoCo TensorFlow Stable Baselines ROS PyTorch RL ML AI Robotics React Native UI OpenGL Qt Git LaTeX WordPress Notion Obsidian Linux PyCharm