Personal Biography
Growing up with the emerging technologies of the 1990s —
Born in 1984, I grew up in a small town in south Germany with a rich cultural history and surrounded by nature. Soon my interest in music was conspicuous, so I picked up the drum sticks at the local music school for regular lessons at the age of 6, and started my first band with classmates a few years later. We didn't get very far, which was partly caused by my raising interest in early 90s techno and DJ culture, for sure inspired from German music television and print magazines. I began to connect a Yamaha keyboard, Hi-fi and light equipment, started to record my own music and distributed it on cassettes to my friends.
At the same time, with the emerge of personal computers, I was instantly fascinated by digital technologies and its creative possibilities. I started to learn programming in (Q)BASIC in 1994 and used it for audiovisual experiments and simple database applications on the family's 386DX PC. I also started to explore fonts, graphics and layout programs in Windows 3.11 and used a laser printer to create small newletter-style fanzines for my friends.
It took some more years until everything changed with the early web and HTML 3.2. I already had my own PC running Windows 95, and my 14.4 kbit modem occupied our phone line for many hours throughout the day. Designing Websites was my first job, and at the age of 14 I was already running a business with a friend from school. We even got awarded with a German government price in 1998 for the best youth web site. The price money went into a brand new 640 MB hard disk so I could store more data.
Creative 2000s —
By the end of the millenium, I kept at playing drums, was listening to acid jazz and funk music, and developed some local reputation as a musician. I joined in the local Jazz big band and several school projects, ranging from choir performances to musicals.
On a sidetrack, I began to connect with more friends from the computing domain through the popular ICQ messenger, and we organized big gatherings with over 400 attendees. We played games, showed off our programming expertise and had fun with creative software tools. The early 2000s were also the golden age of the Java programming language. I learned object-oriented programming in school and released several applications on my personal web site, which was some kind of online diary of my activities.
I was also starting my own band projects now and did first experiments with sound design on synthesizers and digital audio recording. My first commercially released recordings were done in 2003 with the avantgardistic Freiburg-based band BEEAH, where I played drums, percussion and did all the engineering and artwork.
The decade of electronic music —
Moving to Berlin in 2005 strengthened my focus of being a creative, and increased the influence of electronic music to my work. I started to study social and economic communication at University of the Arts and engaged in numerous band projects from Elektro rock, Funk-Jazz, Singer-Songwriter, to Hip Hop. This exciting time was driven by the popular MySpace social network, which allowed independent artists to easily promote themselves and connect with likeminded people in their cities through the Web.
After experimenting with a Yamaha CS-15 synthesizer and various digital keyboards, it was the Nord Modular G2 that completely changed my approach to music. Its digital patching system allowed infinite ways of interaction between microphones, MIDI signals, sequencers and synthesizer modules. I picked up some drum triggers and finally connected my drums and electronic music production into a coherent piece – the 'mad scientist drummer'. The first appearances of my solo show in Berlin's Antje Oklesund club have been the starting point for a span of club and festival performances in 2008 and the following years.
A personal technology footprint —
The solo performances transformed into a central topic of my creative activity in the early 2010s. We opened the Multilayerladen, a bar at Kottbusser Tor where I organized regular concerts and art performances and started to connect with a rich scene of artists in the phyical world. Not only I was touring numerous jazz clubs and electro festivals with my music at that time, I was also starting to present my technological approach to music on various conferences and workshops. A few years later I managed to condense my music system into an interactive sequencer, and released Senode as an acclaimed music production app for the iPad.
Growing my professional career —
At the same time I began more serious investigation with with Computer Science, moving my studies to TU Berlin. In 2012, I had my first touchpoints with Big Data analytics, Information Retrieval and finally Neural Networks, leading me to develop a search engine for crawling and extracting factual data from the web. I began to dig deeper into the field of Human-Computer Interaction, inspired by the way people communicate their information needs to our systems. Within the emerging hype around Deep Learning, I started to research neural knowledge representations and Language Models and published on high-ranked linguistic conferences. By 2020 I got my PhD for my contributions to Machine Reading of domain-specific documents and my Thesis was awarded for the best doctoral thesis of the faculty in Theoretical Sciences.
In the same year I took the opportunity to join a startup in the healthcare industry in order to develop a customer-facing product for medical diagnosis, which we rolled out in several hospitals. I later became Head of Data Science in the company, growing my toolkit of how to build data platforms and inspire software engineering teams to create valuable data products.
The 2020s so far have been fully dedicated to my family and professional career. I am still working with people and machines every day, often acting as a translator between both worlds and their respective needs. Life sciences and healthcare have always been fascinating fields to me, and my day job is tightly connecting these domains with the fast-evolving world of computation and Artificial Intelligence. At the same time, my kids have brought me back to making more music again, so it is very likely you will see me playing my drum kit these days.