Oct 2023

Introduction

Who is Lou Süsslin? A short summary of my academic and professional career thus far and a few more details about my persona.

I have completed completed my B.Sc. degree in Computer Science (with Computational Linguistics as a minor) at Ludwig Maximilian University (or: University of Munich) in August of 2023. Since March 2024 I'm living in Vienna and study Data Science (M.Sc.) at Vienna University of Technology (or TU Wien).

Along my academic journey I have also gained practical experience. Most recently, I have worked as a student assistant for the courses of Human Computer Interaction and Introduction to Media Informatics at TUD. My tasks included holding practice seminars, preparing slides and grading assignmenents. In three months of the summer of 2022, I have also been a student assistant in Human-AI Interaction Design for aviation at the Research Institute of the Free State of Bavaria for software-intensive Systems and Services. I have also gained experience in the industry by working as a Software Engineering Working Student at the renowned German-speaking Q&A platform, gutefrage, from July 2020 to September 2021 in Munich.

During high school summer breaks, I have interned twice. Once at Apple Design Award-winning Ulysses, a text editor application company in Leipzig, and later at tresmo, an Augsburg-based IoT firm.

In my spare time, amongst other activites, I produce techno and other electronic music under the artist name Awkward Endeavor (SoundCloud | bandcamp | Spotify)

Select project work

• (1) my bachelor's thesis at the HCI group of LMU Munich, "Visualizing and Counteracting Touch Overlap during Public Display Interaction" (Supervisors: Linda Hirsch, Prof. Dr. Florian Alt, Prof Dr. Ville Mäkelä)
• (2) a logical programming language written in Haskell
• (3) a "media informatics" seminar paper on leveraging mobile sensors to tackle (health) issues in offices

Other references

• LinkedIn
• GitHub

Origin Story

I was born in Augsburg-Oberhausen, Southern Germany, to a working-class family with deep roots in the East Swabian town dating back to the times coined by protestant weavers in the "Free Imperial City" era (16th century and earlier). My mother is a trained postal worker, and my father worked as a demolition contractor. Both of my grandfathers were predominantly butchers and were of farm families from other areas of the culturally southwestern parts of the Alpine Foreland, predominantly Middle Swabia and East Allgovia. Meanwhile, my grandmothers were born and raised in my hometown, with one of them having more recent roots in the western end of Swabia, in Stuttgart-neighboring Esslingen. I grew up in a 7.5qm room of an apartment located in Wolfram, a working-class neighborhood in Augsburg's, now historic, Textile District.