Malte Grosser

Hi, welcome to Almost Random!

Over the years, I’ve worked in both industry and research, spending quite a bit of time programming, exploring data, and seeing where an idea might lead.

Along the way, I’ve met a lot of interesting people working on similar topics. Every now and then, a neat idea for a side project came up, and some of those kept me busy for quite a while. You’ll find a selection of my projects here, along with talks I’ve given, publications from my research at UKE, and occasional blog posts.

Outside of work, I enjoy basketball, table tennis, and reading.

Interests

Psychology and human behavior
Collaboration and group dynamics
Data platforms and applications
Large language models

Education

Dr. rer. biol. hum., 2022

University of Hamburg · Dissertation
MSc Mathematics, 2013

University of Hamburg
BSc Business Mathematics, 2010

University of Hamburg

Projects

rusershamburg

From beginners to experts, professionals to amateurs, anyone with an interest in R is welcome.

Advanced R Solutions

A set of solutions for the Advanced R programming book.

snakecase-pkg

A systematic approach to parse strings and automate the conversion to snake_case, lowerCamelCase or any other case.

Recent Posts

Adding a free AI chatbot to a blogdown website

Sep 28, 2026 8 min read AI, R-bloggers

I wanted to add a small “Ask AI” window to this website. Visitors should be able to ask about my projects, publications or background and get a short answer with a useful link. Running it should cost nothing. I described my website setup to ChatGPT, followed its suggestions and discussed the parts I wanted to change. That covered choosing a provider, writing the code and adjusting the window for desktop and mobile.

Data dictionaries for humans, agents and jumping frogs

Sep 23, 2026 5 min read R, Python, SQL, R-bloggers

Apparently, you can rent a frog and enter a jumping competition. You might find yourself up against teams with years or even decades of experience selecting and preparing their frogs. Welcome to the Calaveras County Jumping Frog Jubilee. In Astley et al. (2013), researchers studied bullfrog jumps at the event, comparing frogs rented by fairgoers with those entered by experienced teams.1 Their measurements provide the example for the Data Dict quickstart.

Introducing the snakecase package

Mar 6, 2018 3 min read R, R-bloggers

There are many style guides out there which recommend specific naming conventions for programming languages. At 2017’s useR conference Rasmus Bååth showed quite impressively the variety of cases which even exist within base R in his talk “The current state of naming conventions in R”. However, consistent style is not only about naming new objects. Import When you do a data analysis, most of the data already exists and you import it from disk, an API or a database.

Talks

Improved localized prediction of tissue outcome in acute ischemic stroke patients

Oct 14, 2017 10:35 AM

DGNR 2017

PDF

Advanced R Solutions

Jul 13, 2017 4:00 PM

useR! 2017

Slides Video Project

Interactive spatial clusters

Feb 21, 2017 7:00 PM

Hamburg R User Group

Slides Video

snakecase-pkg

May 16, 2017 7:00 PM

Hamburg R User Group

Slides Project

Publications

Grosser M, Gellißen S, Borchert P, Sedlacik J, Nawabi J, Fiehler J, Forkert ND. Localized prediction of tissue outcome in acute ischemic stroke patients using diffusion- and perfusion-weighted MRI datasets. PLoS One, 2020.

Project

Grosser M, Gellißen S, Borchert P, Sedlacik J, Nawabi J, Fiehler J, Forkert ND. Improved multi-parametric prediction of tissue outcome in acute ischemic stroke patients using spatial features. PLoS One, 2020.

PDF Project

Flottmann F, Brooks G, Faizy TD, Ernst M, Forkert ND, Grosser M, Thomalla G, Siemonsen S, Fiehler J, Kemmling A. CT-perfusion stroke imaging: a threshold free probabilistic approach to predict infarct volume compared to traditional ischemic thresholds. Scientific Reports, 2017.

PDF Project

Hochstein J, Nickel M, Löbel U, Grosser M, Sedlacik J, Schulz A. Longitudinal MRI brain volumetry in CLN3 disease: Introduction of a new sensitive and objective marker for the measurement of clinical disease outcome. European Journal of Paediatric Neurology, 2017.

Schneider T, Kuhne JF, Bittrich P, Schroeder J, Magnus T, Mohme M, Grosser M, Schoen G, Fiehler J, Siemonsen S. Edema is not a reliable diagnostic sign to exclude small brain metastases. PLoS One, 2017.

Project

Hochstein J, Nickel M, Löbel U, Grosser M, Sedlacik J, Schulz A. Longitudinal 8-year Brain Volumetric Analysis in 35 CLN3 Patients: Successful Development of a Sensitive Marker to Measure Clinical Outcome. Neuropediatrics, 2017.

Faizy TD, Thaler C, Kumar D, Sedlacik J, Broocks G, Grosser M, Stellmann JP, Heesen C, Fiehler J, Siemonsen S. Heterogeneity of Multiple Sclerosis Lesions in Multislice Myelin Water Imaging. PLoS One, 2016.

Project