Variint

Christina Bornberg

Born in Bregenz, home base in Vienna
BSc in Electronics / FH Technikum Wien
MSc in Medical Imaging / Erasmus Mundus
quit MSc in Ophthalmology / Uni of Miami
Dr in progress / Boku Wien

About me

Hi everyone, I am Christina, currently based in Vienna and this is my project collection website! Here, you’ll find a colourful mix of projects involving mechanistic interpretability, modular networks, layered directed acyclic graphs, and physics-informed neural networks, applied to both ophthalmology and climate research.

Follow my research progress on bluesky or my retired Twitter I also have Linkedin as well as an old-school pdf CV and I am happy to receive post via pigeon, but email may be faster .

Passion

Retinal disease understanding: I am interested in AMD! And to actually understand the data I have been working with in my deep learning projects over the past few years, I decided to pursue a master’s in Vision Science at the University of Miami (and quit after the first year).

Winter colony loss: A disentangled network (DecentNet) approach is a key component of my current doctorate, where I’ll focus on bee health and the factors contributing to winter colony loss, using remote sensing data.

Cherry blossom: Another project using satellite data that I’m currently working on with the senv team involves applying physics-informed neural networks and incorporating climate data, such as La Niña and El Niño phenomena, to predict cherry blossom peak bloom days.

Space missions: My passion for space mission design is for the time being on hold, but everything I learned about planetary science and imaging devices at Conex Research and the ESA Alpbach summer school accompanies me in my remote sensing projects!

Projects

Semi-supervised vessel segmentation (Fetoscopy)

I was working on a semi-supervised vessel segmentation project at WEISS/University College London in the summer of 2021.

Featured in: Computer Vision News, November 2021, pp 62-67

Publication: Presented at CRAS 2022, pp 80

Started: July 2021

Cytotoxicity grading and cell segmentation (Fibroblast)

Instance segmentation with a Mask R-CNN with computer vision generated masks for cells.

Oral session: "Training data preparation with computer vision algorithms for a Mask R-CNN", presented at MICCAI 2020, LABELS workshop

Oral session: "Seamless Iterative Semi-Supervised Correction of Imperfect Labels in Microscopy Images", presented at MICCAI 2022, DART workshop

Started: July 2019

All projects

Find all projects here >

Progress

Updates on my coding and research journey on Twitter @variint and bluesky variint.bsky.social.

I did it!!! Master of Science in Medical Imaging and Applications, probably without distinction!! https://t.co/lMDfwx2Zj3 pic.twitter.com/ZF4fhhG3Sf
— Chrisy Bornberg (@variint) June 27, 2023

I attended #AdobeMAX these past days! The labs and sessions were amazing and I absolutely loved the inspirational keynote!!

[image or embed]
— Chrisy Bornberg (@variint.bsky.social) October 16, 2024 at 11:53 PM

Survived day 5 of way too many smart people in my little hometown of Vienna ❤️ Learned a lot about graphs and mechanistic interpretability - it's fascinating what people around the world are working on!! #ICML2024 pic.twitter.com/wh1KU2tkoc
— Chrisy Bornberg (@variint) July 27, 2024

Timeline

Education & Experience

since 2024

Doctorate: Finding underlying factors of winter colony loss with modular neural networks

Boku Wien
2024-2025

quit degree
Masters in Ophthalmology and Vision Sciences

University of Miami
2022-2024

Resarch Officer (Master Thesis)

Ocular Imaging Research Group, Singapore Eye Research Institute
2021-2023

Erasmus Mundus MSc
Medical Imaging and Applications (MaIA)

University of Bourgundy, University of Cassino, University of Girona
Summer 2021

Summer Internship

Wellcome/EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Sciences (WEISS), University College London
2020-2023

Co-Director and digital systems lead

Conex Research
2020-2021

Undergraduate Researcher

Vienna Reading Center, Department of Ophthalmology, Medical University of Vienna
2019-2020

Exchange Semester

University of Southampton
Summer 2019

Summer Schools in Europe

University of Southern Denmark:
Deep Learning, Python
POLITEHNICA University of Bucharest:
MedTech, Python
ESA Alpbach Summer School:
Geophysics from Space using CubeSats
Tallinn University:
Storytelling and Illustration
2018-2019

Exchange Year

Loughborough University
2016-2021

BSc Electronics

UAS Technikum Vienna
Bachelor Thesis at Austrian Research Institute for Chemistry and Technology (OFI)