Sole Traverso
Photo: SCIoI
Sole Traverso has an interdisciplinary background spanning visual arts, programming, software development, artificial intelligence, and computer vision.
She joined SCIoI as a doctoral researcher in July 2023.
Sole received diplomas from UdK Berlin and an MFA in Arts & Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where she studied on a merit scholarship. At SAIC, she experimented with interactive animation and virtual reality, received a thesis award, and discovered her love for programming. Upon her return, she taught programming at FhP Potsdam and worked for over a decade as an independent software developer for various enterprises, including Polaroid.
At Polaroid, she began experimenting with computer vision, which led her to pursue an MSc in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Bath. She wrote her thesis on transfer learning using the successor representation and the graph Laplacian, graduating with distinction.
She is now a doctoral researcher in the Sprekeler lab and the Science of Intelligence cluster, contributing to project 46, which investigates how mice solve lockboxes. Her own work develops reinforcement learning algorithms that use abstraction and analogy-making to facilitate faster exploration and learning.
Projects
Sole Traverso is member of:
Publications +
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Reiske, P., Boon, M. N., Andresen, N., Traverso, S., Daniels, M., Hohlbaum, K., Lewejohann, L., Thöne-Reineke, C., Hellwich, O., & Sprekeler, H. (2026). Mouse Lockbox Dataset: Behavior Recognition for Mice Solving Lockboxes. International Journal of Computer Vision, 134(7), 318. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-026-02908-x
Boon, M. N., Andresen, N., Traverso, S., Meier, S., Schuessler, F., Hellwich, O., Lewejohann, L., Thöne-Reineke, C., Hohlbaum, K., & Sprekeler, H. (2026). Mechanical problem solving in mice Poster [Poster]. Computational and Systems Neuroscience (COSYNE) 2026.
Boon, M. N., Andresen, N., Traverso, S., Meier, S., Schuessler, F., Hellwich, O., Lewejohann, L., Thöne-Reineke, C., Sprekeler, H., & Hohlbaum, K. (2024). Mechanical problem solving in mice. Animal Behavior and Cognition. https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.07.29.605658
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SSBCracK Defence, Science & Technology News – August 2025 - New Dataset Captures Mice Solving Lockbox Puzzles in Complex Behavioral Study
Phys.org – August 2025 - Mice lockbox puzzle-solving captured in multi-camera video datasets
