About me
I’m Aiman. I studied physics at RWTH Aachen and later moved into software engineering and AI. During my doctoral research at Mercedes-Benz AG and the University of Stuttgart, I worked on the question of how software updates affect automotive production.
I’m a curious and ambitious person by nature. When something genuinely matters to me, I tend to go all in. I like setting myself difficult goals, figuring out how to reach them, and then following through.
At the same time, I care a lot about doing things properly. Whether it is a project, a commitment, or something I simply decided to learn, I would rather invest the time and effort to do it well than take the easiest route.
Curiosity
Curiosity is probably what drives me most. I enjoy understanding how things work, exploring new ideas, meeting people with different perspectives, and constantly learning something I did not know before.
What I enjoy most is understanding technical problems from the ground up. I tend to ask a lot of questions and I rarely like treating a system as a black box. That is probably one reason why my interests range from machine learning and LLMs to CUDA, computer architecture and physics.
I have always liked asking basic questions, even when the answer seems obvious. Roger Penrose once described this attitude in a way that stayed with me:
“Children are not afraid to pose basic questions that may embarrass us, as adults, to ask.”
A book that had a similar influence on me was Jon Stokes’ Inside the Machine. Understanding what processors actually do changed the way I think about software performance, and that interest eventually led me to CUDA and GPU programming.
Data
A large part of my work is about data. I like taking messy real-world data, understanding where it comes from, structuring it and then figuring out whether machine learning actually adds value.
Presenting
I also enjoy presenting and discussing research. Some of the most useful moments in my work have come from someone asking a simple question that forced me to rethink an assumption.
Outside work
Outside work, I spend a lot of time on my motorcycle. I also enjoy photography, cooking, plants and reading.
I also like classic cars. This is a Mercedes-Benz 280 SE 3.5 I came across at the IAA 2025 in Munich. Considering that most of my research deals with automotive software, there is something appealing about cars from a time when none of that existed.
People
The people around me have shaped how I think and who I am, more than any book or course. The first picture is from the day of my doctoral examination, with the person who was my supervisor, mentor and friend throughout. The second is the team that made those years what they were, at a minigolf afternoon we took slightly too seriously.
About work
I see work as making high-quality decisions under real-world constraints, guided by long-term thinking.
For me, good work is not about making things unnecessarily complicated. It is about understanding what really matters, taking responsibility for decisions, and creating something that holds up beyond the immediate problem.
About life
I see happiness in life as being present, not feeling that something is missing, and having the courage to accept what is.
I believe ambition and contentment can exist at the same time. You can want to grow, achieve more, and explore what is possible without constantly postponing happiness to some future milestone.
