Bio

A transdisciplinary technologist with a broad education and diverse interests, I've worn many hats throughout my career including that of a national economist, market/social researcher, cybernetician, computer scientist and entrepreneur. Often these hats were interchangeable (and overlaid). In computer networking my experience reaches back to the early days of the ARPAnet when I found myself as a teen with a shared office in UCLA's Boelter Hall. Fast forward to the early 1990s and I found myself as founder of one of the first ISPs in Germany. A dominant focus of my R&D over the past 20+ years has been text retrieval, metadata, data mining, knowledge discovery, pattern recognition, NLP and machine learning. I have been a part of many publically funded projects, worked with German, EU and UN organizations and collaborated with a number of research institutes and national scientific agencies. I have authored a number of software packages. I have had an active role in the development of several international information standards (ISO23950/Z39.50, EDTF/ISO8601, OASIS SRU/W, OASIS CAP, ISO32000/PDF2.0, GILS, FGDC ASF, ISO19115/Geospatial metadata,..) and contributed to many open source projects (among others Isite/Isearch, wxWidgets, wxPython, Python, Cairo, SWIG, Drupal, LibreOffice, ...) In late 2011 the focus of my work shifted to the needs of (mainly German) financial institutions and their document lifecycle management. Parallel to the rapid development of GPGPUs and the pace of recent results I also renewed my interest in computer vision, artificial neural networks and reinforced learning. My particular domain focus was document recognition (data extraction, OCR etc.) and business intelligence (extracting, for example, charts and graphs from documents). In 2015 I turned to focus fully on ML, consulting a wide range of projects. These days besides consulting I'm teaching and mentoring some bleeding edge AI start-ups.