Work

About me
I received a degree in Wirtschaftsinformatik (~ MSc. in Information Systems) from the University of Mannheim in 2004. My majors were Information Systems, Software Engineering and Organizational Theory. During that time I spent one semester at the National University of Singapore and worked for Roche Diagnostics, WissensWerk GmbH and as a freelance programmer.

Since 2005, I am a research associate in the IPE group at the FZI Research Center for Information Technologies at the University of Karlsruhe (TH). IPE is an interdisciplinary group headed by four Professors with around 30 researchers dealing with several phenomena of information; from databases, processes and AI to business issues. My PhD advisor is Prof. Dr. Rudi Studer.

Research
My research intersects the fields of Knowledge Management and Semantic Technologies. Particular research areas are
 * Social Software / Agile Organizations (Search and Knowledge Acquisition, Knowledge Sharing, Semantic Wikis)
 * Software Engineering (Collaborative Software Development, Knowledge Management in Software Engineering and Semantic Web-Enabled Software Engineering)

Futher research interests include tools and methods for Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) and the Theory of Science and Design.

Projects

 * GlobaliSE: Empowering SMEs for Global Software Engineering
 * TEAM: Enabling the Software Engineering Semantic Web with intelligent IDEs
 * WAVES: Knowledge exchange in distrubuted software engineering
 * CollaBaWue: Semantic-web-enabled software engineering

Software

 * TeamWeaver is an OSGi-based framwork for context-aware assistance and information management for knowledge workers - especially software engineers with web-based and Eclipse-based user interfaces
 * Woogle4MediaWiki is a social search extension for MediaWiki
 * Ontobrowse is a research protype for the ontology-based integration and browsing of software architecture documentation

Professional activities

 * Workshop on Managing Requirements Knowledge (MaRK'09) in conjunction with the 16th IEEE Requirements Engineering Conference (Co-Organizer)
 * Workshop "KNOWledge engINeering in Global software development" (KNOWING) in conjunction with the 4th IEEE International Conference on Global Software Engineering (Programm Committee)
 * Workshop "Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing in Software Development Teams" (sofTEAM'09) at SE2009 (Co-Organizer)
 * Workshop on Managing Requirements Knowledge (MaRK'08) in conjunction with the 16th IEEE Requirements Engineering Conference (Co-Organizer)
 * Workshop "Agile Knowledge Sharing for Distributed Software Teams" (AKNOWLEDGE '08) at SE2008 (Co-Organizer)
 * Workshop "Social Web and Knowledge Management" (SWKM 2008) at WWW 2008 (Programm Committee)
 * MFG Working group "Knowledge Management with Social Software", July 2006 - Mai 2007 (Moderator)
 * 2nd International Workshop on Meta-modelling and Ontologies (WoMM 2006) (Reviewer)

Publications
See my publications page at FZI.

Teaching

 * Seminar "Social Software Engineering", Summer Semester 2009, Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe
 * Seminar "Social Software Engineering", Summer Semester 2008, Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe
 * Lecture "Computer-Supported Cooperative Work", Fall Trimester 2007, International University of Bruchsal
 * Seminar "Akteure und Prozesse in der kollaborativen Softwareentwicklung", Winter Semester 2007/2008, Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe

Job & Thesis offers
The following topics and proposals are open for dedicated students seeking to write a thesis (diploma/bachelor/master), working as student helpers ("hiwis") or doing internships.

University of Karlsruhe students are eligible from both the School of Economics and Business Engineering and the School of Computer Science. Other students are welcome if their school allows for writing an external thesis.

Currently, I am especially offering for the following topics:
 * Knowledge management in software engineering
 * Collaborative and social search
 * Social software, esp. Wikis
 * Design science

More concrete topics can be discussed upon interest. Own ideas/proposals are welcome. Just send me an e-mail.

A thesis can be defined with varying degrees of theoretical/technical and empirical focus.

For those interested in implementation work, most of our technical results are (going to be) released as Open Source code. Current larger implementation projects include:
 * Knowledge sharing and recommendation tools for software engineers (Eclipse-based)
 * Next Generation Semantic Wikis
 * Tools for social semantic search
 * Frameworks for information and knowledge metrics

Student work at FZI includes regular presentations and teaching in scientific methods (IPE Studentenkolloqium).