I am an interdisciplinary researcher with a PhD in computer science and a background somewhere between computational linguistics, information retrieval, machine learning, and digital humanities.

At the moment, I am the Head of the Digital Information and Research Infrastructures department at the Georg Eckert Institute since April 2015 and in October 2019 I was appointed professor for digital transformation and digital humanities at The Institute of Technical and Business Information Systems (ITI) in the Faculty of Computer Science at Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg . Since May 2015 I was also appointed by the Guglielmo Marconi University of Rome as an associate professor in “computational engineering”.

I studied computational linguistics at Bielefeld University, whereupon I took a position as a research fellow in the research institute ITC-IRST (now FBK) in Trento, Italy. I then gained my doctorate in computer science from the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg with a thesis on “Semantic support in multilingual text retrieval”.

My research and teaching in this field include data and web mining, human-machine interaction, information processing, user and data modeling as well as the Semantic Web and information retrieval. These topics are closely related to the analysis of complex data.

After completing my  PhD and undertaking post-doctoral work at the Otto von Guericke University, I was head of the “Information Retrieval and Machine Learning” competence center at the Berlin University of Technology’s “Distributed Artificial Intelligence Laboratory” (DAI-Lab). In this period I continued my research in the fields of Intelligent Information Management and the Semantic Social Web.

From October 2012 until March 2015 I had a full professorship in “information science” (W2) and was head of their Institute for Information and Documentation (IID) and vice-president for International and Information Technology at the Potsdam University of Applied Sciences (FHP). Requirements analysis and personalized information services, as well as the evaluation of information architectures, were part of my teaching and formed the basis of my research projects at the Potsdam University of Applied Sciences.

My main research areas are information retrieval, machine learning, recommender systems, data analysis, knowledge organisation, computational linguistics and digital humanities.

I have written over 150 papers for national and international conferences and journals, organized and chaired numerous workshops, and am regular reviewer and programme committee member of different high-profile journals and conferences.