Welcome to my home page!
I am a computer scientist, author, and independent scholar. I'm a founding member of radikal:klima, the new political party that aims to transform Berlin and make it a carbon-neutral and fair city in a carbon-neutral, sustainable, and fair world. It's urgent since there is not much time left to save civilization as we know it!
I'm a contributor and user of Elefen, or Lingua Franca Nova, a simple and well-sounding constructed language designed to make global communication easy and fair. / Me usa e contribui a elefen, un lingua construida simple e bon sonante cual es desiniada per fa la comunica internasional fasil e justa.
In 2016/17 I worked for the research project Society After Money (German: Die Gesellschaft nach dem Geld), which had the goal of exploring the possibilities and challenges of a world where money, exchange, and capital no longer matter.
From 2008 to early 2016 I worked as a freelance software engineer in Berlin, Germany. For the last two years I freelanced as a Python and Haskell developer for the Liquid Democracy Association. Before that, I did Java and SQL development for various companies including Zalando, Rocket Internet, and Project A.
When I don't have to work, I like to write, talk, or research about peer production, free software, open hardware, and commonism. My most well-know works are about commons-based peer production and how to generalize it into the physical world.
I hold a Ph.D. in computer science from the Freie Universität Berlin.
My brother Martin also has a website. My uncle Dirk died in March 2016. We will not forget him.
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From Exchange to Contributions
Peer production – the way in which free software
projects such as GNU/Linux and free content projects such as the Wikipedia are
produced – has revolutionized the areas of software and content production
during the last decades. But does peer production only work for information
goods, or can it have a similar effect on the production of physical goods? |
Beitragen statt tauschen
Die deutsche Übersetzung meines Buchs From Exchange to Contributions: das Buch beschäftigt sich dem Potenzial der Peer-Produktion – der Art und Weise wie Freie Software und Freie Inhalte produziert werden. Wir wissen, dass diese neue Produktionsweise von großer Bedeutung ist, wenn es um Software und Inhalte geht – Erfolgsgeschichten wie die von GNU/Linux, Apache oder der Wikipedia sprechen hier eine deutliche Sprache. Aber mein Buch zeigt, dass das noch längst nicht alles ist: Peer-Produktion hat das Potenzial für mehr, bis hin zu einer Umwälzung der gesamten gesellschaftlichen Produktion. |
An Incrementally Trainable Statistical Approach to Information Extraction
My Ph.D. thesis, finished in 2007: The purpose of
Information Extraction (IE) is to find desired pieces of information in
unstructured or weakly structured texts and store them in a form that is
suitable for automatic querying and processing. This book presents a
innovative approach to statistical information extraction. It introduces a
new algorithm which supports functionality not available in previous IE
systems, such as interactive incremental training to reduce the human
training effort. |
What You'll Find on My SiteLytspel (external)A simple phonetic respelling for the English language, based on the idea that spelling should be fun, not a burden. The traditional English spelling system is afflicted with exceptions and conflicting rules, making writing and reading texts unnecessarily hard. Lytspel reforms the English spelling to make it strictly follow the alphabetic principle. Free SoftwareI have contributed to various free software projects, and have also written a few (mostly small) programs of my own. On this page you can also find a list of my translations for the GNU Project and an overview of my experiences in commercial software development. Free SocietyI'm involved in a blog and wiki discussing whether and how the practices of free software and open content development can be extended to other areas of production, and whether an economy based on this mode of production is possible. My research on these questions has lead to a book which is available in English and German. Additionally, this page lists older texts which I wrote as a student, and more. Spam FilteringSpam is ubiquitous, highly adapting to any counter-measures, and most annoying. This makes spam filtering one of the most important and interesting research topics in the field of text classification and text mining. Here you'll find my contributions to this effort. Information ExtractionThis page is dedicated to my Ph.D. project. The primary goal of my Ph.D. research was to develop and evaluate a statistical system for the extraction of information from natural language texts that supports incremental training and that takes the structure of texts into account. My Ph.D. thesis, publications, and software are all available here. History of ComputingAs a student I worked for an experimental teaching project with the purpose of giving computer science students a better insight into how to write good papers and to conduct larger research activities. As the topic area of the project we had chosen historical developments in the fields of computer science and software development; both to open up an interesting field of exploration that is largely outside the scope of usual CS teachings and to provide the students with a better understanding of the history of their own field. ContactHow to get in touch with me. |
Keimform ArticlesI'm a co-author in the German-language Keimform-Blog, a group weblog discussing whether and in which ways commons-based peer production has a potential that extends beyond the areas of free software and open content production where it has first emerged. Here you can preview my most recent contributions and the latest articles published in the blog by any author.
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[Last generated: 2021-01-21] |
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