Your Contact Partner

Dr.-Ing.

Thomas Low

Founder and CEO

References

• 2023 - 2024: Development of an automated visual inspection system for industrial components on behalf of an automotive supplier: controlling and calibrating industrial cameras, gpu-accelerated image processing, 3d model comparison, surface evaluation, and interactive visualization of detected defects
• 2023: Development of OpenSource WordPress plugins that allow to manage bibliographic metadata (e.g. Marc21 XML, OAI-PMH 2.0, CrossRef DOI) on behalf of the Verfassungsblog
• 2021 - 2022: Automatic classification of bibliographic data in complex hierarchical category systems (e.g. the Regensburger Association Classification) for the Saxon State and University Library Dresden
• 2021 - 2022: Usability and performance improvements of the OpenSource software Kitodo-Production, a web-based tool to support digitization work in libraries, museums and digital archives for the non-profit organization Kitodo. Key to digital objects e.V.
• 2021: Foundation of knopflogik GmbH as a one-person company, design and development of a product prototype for document search
• 2017 - 2020: Design and development of a quality assurance system for a car manufacturer using GPU-based real time processing of camera images and methods from the area of machine learning (in4s GmbH)
• 2018 - 2019: Design and execution of training courses in the area of machine learning and deep learning for a car manufacturer (in4s GmbH)
• 2017 - 2018: Development of an interactive search tool for the purpose of technology research for a car manufacturer (in4s GmbH)
• 2016 - 2017: Design, development and eye-tracking evaluation of a web search interface that integrates domain-specific ontologies as part of the Special Research Field "Transregio 62 Companion Technology" at the Data & Knowledge Engineering Group (Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg)
• 2014: Development of a similarity-based image search tool on behalf of the Fink + Partner Media Services GmbH within the scope of my dissertation at the Data & Knowledge Engineering Group (Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg)
• 2010 - 2011: Analysis of user behaviour (log file analysis) of search engines on behalf of the German Youth Institute (DJI) within the scope of my dissertation at the Data & Knowledge Engineering Group (Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg)
• 2009 - 2010: Design and development of a prediction model for the Van-Allen radiation belts for the purpose of planning optimization of the INTEGRAL satellite as part of an internship at the ESA / ESOC (diploma thesis)
• 2008 - 2009: Development of a monitoring module for the Worldwide Large Computing Grid (WLCG) as part of an internship at CERN

Expertise

AI & Machine Learning

• Scientific understanding of recent learning methods (Naive Bayes, Support Vector Machines, Bootstrapping, Random Forests, Artificial Neural Networks, Deep Learning) as well as various related methods for evaluation and data pre-processing
• Hands-on experience in the area of Dimensionality Reduction, Multidimensional Scaling (MDS), Self-Organizing Maps (SOM), Autoencoder Networks implemented in Python, Scikit-Learn, Numpy, Tensorflow, Pandas and Matplotlib

Search Engines and Natural Language Processing

• Scientific understanding of search technologies (indexing data structures, ranking functions, evaluation methods)
• Hands-on experience in the area of document analysis, e.g, indexing, stemming, named entity recognition, word2vec, Lucene, Solr, ElasticSearch, ontologies and RDF

Image Processing and 3d Reconstruction

• Industrial experience in the area of image processing for the purpose of detecting defects on reflective surfaces (OpenGL Shader Language, C++, OpenCV)
• Industrial experience in setting up, operating and integrating industrial camera systems for companies like Baumer, Balluff and IDS (GiGE Vision Standard)
• Industrial experience in real-time reconstruction of image data using 3d models, camera calibration, ray tracing or rather ray casting

User Interaction Design

• Scientific understanding regarding the design, development and evaluation of interactive user interfaces, the executing of user studies for the purpose of evaluating user behavior and user satisfaction (study design, questionnaires, eye-tracking, log analysis)
• Hands-on experience regarding the development of interactive user interfaces using JavaScript, Typescript, React, RxJS, Redux, Webpack, jQuery, Java + JSF

Full-Stack Software Development and More

• Hands-on experience regarding the development of micro services, REST interfaces (using Python Django, NodeJS Express), websocket communication (Socket.IO), message queues (Apache ActiveMQ), SQL databases (Postgres, MariaDB), NoSQL databases (MongoDB, Redis)
• Hands-on DevOps and deployment experience for continuous delivery using Git, Gitlab, Rancher, Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes and Nagios
• Hands-on experience in administrating Linux servers (Fedora, CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian) especially remote access (SSH, VNC), network configuration (Iptables, Firewalld), web server configuration (Nginx, Apache, Jetty, Tomcat), service configuration (Systemd), file exchange (Samba), packet management (RPM packaging), container management (Docker, Kubernetes)

Education

• 2022: Doctoral degree for the thesis "Towards Combining Search and Exploration - Escaping the Filter Bubble through Map-Based Exploration" at the Data & Knowledge Engineering Group of the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg
• 2010 - 2017: Doctoral student and scientific staff at the Data & Knowledge Engineering Group of the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg
• 2005 - 2010: Diploma in Computer Science at the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg

Research Publications

• T. Low ‘Towards Combining Search and Exploration - Escaping the Filter Bubble Through Map-based Exploration’. Dissertation at the Data & Knowledge Engineering Group of the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, pp. 222, 2022
• T. Low, C. Hentschel, S. Polley, A. Das, H. Sack, A. Nürnberger and S. Stober. ‘The ISMIR Explorer - A Visual Interface for Exploring 20 Years of ISMIR Publications’. In: Proc. of the 20th Int. Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR), pp. 392-399, 2019
• P. Butka, T. Low, M. Kotzyba, S. Haun and A. Nürnberger. ‘Exploration of Web Search Results Based on the Formal Concept Analysis’. In: Proc. of the 3rd Int. Conf. on Semantic Keyword-Based Search on Structured Data Sources (IKC), pp. 123-135, 2018
• T. Low, C. Hentschel, S. Stober, H. Sack and A. Nürnberger. ‘Exploring Large Movie Collections: Comparing Visual Berrypicking and Traditional Browsing’. In: Proc. of the 23rd Int. Conf. on MultiMedia Modeling (MMM), pp. 198-208, 2017
• T. Low, N. Bubalo, T. Gossen, M. Kotzyba, A. Brechmann, A. Huckauf and A. Nürnberger. ‘Towards Identifying User Intentions in Exploratory Search Using Gaze and Pupil Tracking’. In: Proc. of the Conf. on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR), pp. 273-276, 2017
• S. Stober, T. Low, C. Hentschel, H. Sack and A. Nürnberger. ‘The ISMIR Paper Explorer: A Map-Based Interface for MIR Literature Research’. In: Extended Abstracts for the Late-Breaking Demo Session of the 16th Int. Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR), 2015
• M. Kotzyba, D. Ponomaryov, T. Low, M. Thiel, B. Glimm and A. Nürnberger. ‘Ontology-supported Exploratory Search for Physical Training Exercises’. In: Demonstrations Track at the 14th Int. Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), Vol. 1486, 2015
• P. Butka, T. Low, M. Kotzyba, S. Haun and A. Nürnberger. ‘A Framework for FCA-based Exploratory Web Search’. In: Proc. of the 1st Int. Symposium on Companion-Technology (ISCT), pp. 131-136, 2015
• T. Low, C. Hentschel, S. Stober, H. Sack and A. Nürnberger. ‘Visual Berrypicking in Large Image Collections’. In: Proc. of the 8th Nordic Conf. on Human-Computer Interaction: Fun, Fast, Foundational (NordiCHI), pp. 1043–1046, 2014
• S. Stober, T. Low, T. Gossen and A. Nürnberger. ‘Incremental Visualization of Growing Music Collections’. In: Proc. of the 14th Int. Society on Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR), pp. 433-438, 2013
• T. Low, C. Borgelt, S. Stober and A. Nürnberger. ‘The Hubness Phenomenon: Fact or Artifact?’. In: Towards Advanced Data Analysis by Combining Soft Computing and Statistics. Vol. 285. Studies in Fuzziness and Soft Computing, pp. 267–278, 2013
• A. Hein, T. Low, M. Hensch, T. Kirste and A. Nürnberger. ‘Gesture Spotting for Controlling a Mobile Assistance System for Service and Maintenance’. In: GI-Jahrestagung. Vol. 208. LNI, pp. 549–560, 2012
• T. Gossen, T. Low and A. Nürnberger. ‘What are the real differences of children’s and adults’ web search’. In: Proc. of the 34th Int. Conf. on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), pp. 1115–1116, 2011