Markus Flicke

PhD student in Machine Learning & NLP at the University of Tübingen, and Tech Lead of Scholar Inbox.

Markus Flicke

I am the Tech Lead of Scholar Inbox, a personalized paper-recommendation platform now used by 40k PhD-level researchers. I lead a team of 10 and built the recommender system, the active-learning onboarding that solves the cold-start problem, and the semantic search and retrieval stack.

I am a PhD student at the Autonomous Vision Group in Tübingen, supervised by Prof. Andreas Geiger. I work on natural language processing: long-context transformer models, generative recommendation systems, and the evaluation of research ideation agents.

My path began with Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London, followed by Data Science at Marburg, a Master's in Computer Science in Tübingen, and 8 months as a data scientist at Doxa Partners LLP in London.

News

12.03.2026
Invited speaker at MLCon 2026 on active learning and the cold-start problem (video).
01.06.2026
Won the Nebius Hackathon Munich prize for the project “Toolstack Overflow”.
10.06.2025
Won the Cyber Valley AI Incubator for best pitch and best business model ($25k).
01.03.2025
Scholar Inbox: Personalized Paper Recommendations for Scientists accepted at the ACL 2025 demo track.

Selected Publications

Evaluating Ideation Agents
Under submission
Evaluating Ideation Agents on Future Scientific Discoveries
Flicke, He, Chitta, Cao, Geiger

The first comparable evaluation technique for research ideation agents that goes beyond LLM-as-a-judge, grounding evaluation in future scientific discoveries.

Scholar Inbox
ACL 2025 · Demo
Scholar Inbox: Personalized Paper Recommendations for Scientists
Flicke, Angrabeit, Iyengar, Protsenko, Shakun, Cicvaric, Kargi, He, Schuler, …, Geiger
Hierarchical Document Transformer
COLM 2024
HDT: Hierarchical Document Transformer
He*, Flicke*, Buchmann, Buchmann, Gurevych, Geiger

A long-context, hierarchical transformer-encoder with a custom CUDA kernel giving a 7.5× training speed-up.

Experience

Tech Lead, Scholar Inbox, Autonomous Vision Group

Lead the technical development of scholar-inbox.com, coordinating a team of 10. Built the recommender system, active-learning onboarding, semantic search & retrieval, and the UI. 40k PhD-level users to date.

Full-Stack Engineer, Scholar Inbox, MPI for Intelligent Systems

First work on Scholar Inbox with Python, PostgreSQL and Flask. Scaled the platform from one to a few hundred users while obsessing over customer experience.

Research Assistant, Chronicle, University of Marburg

Built “Chronicle”, a no-SQL time-series database with state-of-the-art write speeds, now in use at the CERN particle accelerator. Iterated on the Java API and refactored a complex inheritance structure.

Education

PhD in Machine Learning & NLP, University of Tübingen

Supervised by Prof. Andreas Geiger. Published a long-context hierarchical transformer with a CUDA kernel, a recommendation system and dataset, and grounded evaluation for research ideation agents.

MSc Computing, University of Tübingen

Master's thesis on recommender systems for Scholar Inbox, reaching 96% NDCG. Supervised directly by Prof. Andreas Geiger.

BSc Data Science, University of Marburg

Bachelor's thesis on predicting antimicrobial peptides using evolutionary algorithms. Learning: don't use evolutionary algorithms.

Affiliations

University of Tübingen MPI for Intelligent Systems University of Marburg Doxa Partners Imperial College London