Christopher Mutschler is director of the Positioning and Networks division at Fraunhofer IIS in Nuremberg, Germany. Prior to that, Christopher was head of the Precise Positioning and Analytics department (2020-2024), headed the Machine Learning & Information Fusion group (2017-2019) and was a chief scientist at the Locating and Communication Systems department (2015-2017) at Fraunhofer IIS. He simultaneously was part-time scientific staff at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) where he gave several courses on machine learning. He received his PhD from Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) on distributed event-based system middleware in computer science in 2014, where he also obtained his diploma in computer science.
Christopher’s research focuses on machine learning for the processing and representation of sequential data (both the modeling and representation of sensor signals and the formulation and control of sequential decision problems) at the interface to engineering problems, most of them in the area of hybrid sensor fusion in (mainly radio-based) locating systems. Besides some foundational ML research in the context of active learning, resulting from human-in-the-loop problems, my research is primarily driven by the resource-efficient processing and fusion of complex (mostly inertial and (5G) wireless) and multi-modal sensor data, Quantum Reinforcement Learning, as well as safe exploration and interpretability in reinforcement learning. The combination of position determination and machine learning was also used in motion and avatar reconstruction in large-scale virtual reality environments, which ultimately led to a successful spin-off. He actively serves as a reviewer and area chair for numerous conferences (including NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML