About Me

G'day, こんにちは, 哈囉, I'm Benjamin Beilharz, or just Ben. During my studies at National Taiwan University I received another name – 柏光明 (Bo Guang Ming). I am a Ph.D. candidate at Technical University of Darmstadt, based in Germany under the supervision of Thomas Wallis. I yield a Bachelor's in Computational Linguistics and a Master's in Computer Science with focus on Visual Computing.

My research revolves around understanding the mind and brain, with a special interest in visual perception and building neuroadaptive systems that bridge the brain and machine perception, ultimately aligning human-machine vision to coexist 『共生』. My work blends (inverse) rendering, cognitive neuroscience, neuro AI, and brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) to understand and enhance how humans see, attend, and interact with their environments. I’m especially interested in approaches inspired by predictive coding, neural decoding, and perceptual inference, aiming to dynamically shape visual experiences by neural signals.

Besides the research questions, I am also an avid fan for animation and VFX. In fact, Avatar influenced me, that I started to pursue physically based rendering and computer graphics in general. In my free time, I like to do photography, read SF, learn new languages, travel, work on my own renderer and contribute to Blender, or open standards hosted by the Academy Software Foundation (MaterialX, OSL).

I am very happy to connect with people to practice 中文 / 日本語 and talk about our passion projects.