My name is Martin Stolle and I am German. However, for the past 3-4 years (since the summer of 1997) I have spent most of my time in some part of North America. More about that later - first things first. I was born on the 31st of August 1981 in Perpignan, France. No, it was not planned that I was born in France - but stuff happens. I grew up in Dusseldorf, Germany. The first 5 years of my life I lived in downtown Dusseldorf. My favorite "toy" started to become "FischerTechnik". It's a construction kit similar to Lego Technic, except that it is far more flexible, durable and advanced. They actually came out with computer interfaces for it in the early 80s, so you could hook it up to your Atari, Commodore, Amiga or PC. I went to school at the tender age of 5 in 1987 (well, I turned 6 shortly afterward). It was not much later that I started coding away on a Commodore 64 (gotta love Peeks and Pokes...). I also learned sailing in the Optimist Dinghy at around this time. In 1991 I finished Elementary school and went to the St. Suitbertus Gymnasium not far from where I lived. I started with Latin as my first foreign language. In 7th grade I took English as compulsory second foreign language. In 9th grade I took the class "Math, Physics, CS" as third elective.

In 1997 I made the big jump across the ocean. I started studying at St. Johnsbury Academy in St. Johnsbury, VT. It's a private high school that is half boarding and half day school. It was planned that I would only stay for one year so I decided to take Calculus AP math right away so that I wouldn't get behind my classmates in Germany who would be preparing for their Abitur. As it turned out, I was one of the very few Juniors in Calculus and the only one that stayed until the end. I also took Chemistry AP in which I got the maximum achievable score. (The same for "AP International English where I took the AP test without having taken a preparatory course). I was on Honor Role most of my first year and I also became a student proctor for the student center. As the year neared it's end, I decided that I would like to stay for another year. One of the main reasons for that was that a new law in Germany allowed me to get my High School Diploma together with good scores on the AP tests approved as the German Abitur. In my second year I took Physics AP and Computer Science AP. In both I also got a score of 5. Furthermore I took the French AP and German AP test - in both I got the maximum score of 5. Also, I became the Head Student Proctor for the student center as well as a student proctor for the dormitory "The Barn" I lived in. I applied to many great Universities in the US and to McGill University in Canada. Unfortunately, no University except McGill University recognized the genius in me (yeah right) so that I had no choice but to go to McGill University. I graduated in the summer of 1999 and even received the Mathematics as well as the Science prize on Class Day. During the Commencement procedure I furthermore received the Faculty Service Award.

My first year at McGill University was more or less filled with required Math and Computer Science courses as well as the Biology Freshman course - the only Freshman course I was not exempted from as I didn't take the Biology AP course. My GPA was fairly decent in my first year but it could have been a lot better hadn't I screwed up in one of my Math courses. I also became a member of the McGill Science Computer Taskforce. The Taskforce is a group of dedicated volunteer students that is running THE science computer network for all McGill Undergraduate Science students with almost 100 computers at various locations around campus and a 24/7 computer lab.

In my second year I did a lot better. I got straight A's (well, one A- in Philosophy and one A- in Probability) so my GPA is more respectable. In the first half of the second year, I got the Lectures Online project by the Computer Taskforce off the ground. The Lectures Online Project is a project where we are recording lectures in the major auditoriums of McGill and make them available on our web servers so that students can listen to them from home. Most of the technical ground work was done by former Taskforce Chair Nic Siggel. However, as the material is copyrighted, we need to get permissions for all professors and that never happened until the beginning of that year when I started pushing the project really hard. In the second semester I was also a Research Assistant for the "Laboratory for Natural and Simulated Cognition" and worked on their Simulator for Cascaded Correlation Artificial Neural Network. (you can see it at work here). I took a graduate course in Machine Learning and did research for my Honors Project on Learning Options in Reinforcement Learning. (see Research section)

In my third year at McGill, things did not go so well. I had quite a hard first semester because I took work intensive courses like Compilers, practiced for the ACM contest a lot and did research at the same time. Worst of all, I made the very unintelligent choice of taking "Circuitry of the Brain", a very hard anatomy course - feared by most anatomy students - as elective. I thought it would be interesting to know about the human brain if I was going to work on artificial ones. At least I did well in my other courses like Compilers and Mobile Robotics which were very interesting and were a lot of fun. In the second semester, things overall didn't go so well, although I didn't have any really bad courses either.

Now I am working on my Master of Science degree at McGill. I decided to stay at McGill for my Master's, because I was already working on interesting research and this will enable me to do my Master's in three semesters (approximately one year). Furthermore, should I decide to go back to Europe, a Master's degree would be regarded as a finished University degree, while many places still regard the Bachelor's as something like a "Vordiplom" and I would not be able to capitalize on a half-finished Ph.D.