We begin where others give up.
(C) Seewald Solutions, 1180 Wien, Austria. Commercial use prohibited.
Curriculum Vitae
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- Full Name: Alexander K. Seewald, Dr.technicae
(equiv. PhD in Technical Sciences)
- Born 8th December of 1975 in Vienna, Austria
- Languages: proficient in German and English, basic knowledge of French
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- October 1999 - March 2003: Doctoral studies in Technical Sciences at Vienna University of Technology, Defense of PhD dissertation Towards Understanding
Stacking concerned with research in the area of Ensemble Learning. Passed with honors. Several international publications on the dissertation's topic, see Publications.
- 1994 - 1999: Diploma study Informatik (Computer Science, Informatics) at Vienna University of Technology. Diploma thesis A Mobile Robot Toy Cat controlled by Vision and Motivation. Average grade over all exams (weighted by week-hours): 1.17 (1 = best, 5 = worst)
- 1986 - 1994: Basic education at the Naturwissenschaftliches Bundesrealgymnasium Schmelz, 1150 Vienna (corresponding approximately to high school plus college). Matura (Graduation) with highest distinction.
Since 2007: Independent Researcher / Consultant for Data Mining
(specializing in text, image and video data); Customer Relationship
Management (including multi-effect response analysis, specialized reporting
and cognitive automation of recurring tasks); Spam-Filtering (evaluation,
development, finetuning and proactive spam-filtering techniques) and related
topics.
2006 - Feb. 2007: CRM Analyst at the Marketing division of GE Money Bank, Dienstzeugnis (in German)
- Implemented fully automated mailing selection with integrity checks and validations for about a dozen different mailing types (including regular monthly and ad-hoc), extensive reporting (mailings, telesales, prospective card buyers, fraud suspects, ...), and customer deduplication (improvement of data quality, response measurements for mailings to external customers).
- Validated mailing response measurement and implemented standardized mailing response reporting for all mailings. Global analysis of cumulative effects of about a dozen marketing actions (e.g. billboards, radio ads, print, renovating and moving branches, local and global campaigns, mailings, ...) yielded useful results for strategic adjustment of marketing actions.
- Research and development of a propensity model for customer selection. Estimated effect of several million EUR additional volume per year. See also Publications, [Seewald, 2007].
- Test of the short-term effect of offering birthday presents to customers yielded a cost reduction on the order of several 10,000 EUR. Test of long-term effect is ongoing.
2000 - 2005: Scientific Researcher at the Machine Learning Group, Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (ÖFAI), Dienstzeugnis (in German)
- 2005: Researched and developed a SpamAssassin-based email spam filter
system (sampling, training, evaluation) which was deployed to seven test
users, to be used institute-wide. See also Spam project.
- 2003 - 2005: Text mining in biological research literature and online databases (BioMinT) - EU-funded research project, Framework 5, Quality of Life.
Implementation of a parser for fourteen online databases, transitive closure on the
link graph, output as name pairs (synonyms) - 12 million pairs in all. Research and development in biological species recognition, named entity recognition, ranking and filtering systems, evaluation and validation of the system, and basic research on redundancy recognition (sentence entailment)
- 2002: 3D Search (Development of intelligent characterisation methods
for large document collections. Collaboration with uma.information technology GmbH) - research project, jointly funded by EU and uma under the heading of Information Society Technologies (IST).
Developed a new approach to multi-document summarization. Implemented and optimized a java-based approach dealing with a 2.6 million terms, 100,000 documents matrix. Developed a new measure to trade off precision and recall, see also Publications.
- 2000 - 2001: A new modular architecture for Data Mining - FWF (local funding institution) funded research project.
Developed several machine learning algorithms: Hybrid Decision Trees, Grading, and StackingC. Extensive experiments with parameter settings and different ensemble learning systems - several experiments ran up to 15 CPU months, distributed on ten different machines, with a
crude form of load balancing. All of these are available as part of WEKA.
Several internal research projects and building up my own research agenda, see Projects.
Supervised several Praktika on interesting topics such as television advertisement recognition, implementation of a string kernel for WEKA and analysis of effectiveness of marketing campaigns.
- June 2008: Invited talk on Challenges for Machine Learning and Data Mining in Predictive Behavioral Targeting (in German) for the Data Mining Cup. Received the
Prof. Dr. Werner Dilger Award.
- May 2008: Invited talk on Open Source Data Mining (in German) for the Linux weeks in Vienna, Austria.
- November 2007: Invited article Gegenwart und Zukunft des Spam (Present and Future of Spam) in the Austrian magazin WCM.
- 21. September 2007: Invited talk on Success Stories in
Intelligent Biomedical Data Analysis, Bonn, Germany, by Dr.med. Michael Steffens of the Institute for Medical
Biometry, Informatics and Epidemiology at the Medical Faculty of the University of Bonn.
- 24. March 2006: Invited talk on AI in Image Processing. Invitation by Eberle Automatische Systeme GmbH, Dornbirn, Vorarlberg. There was another interview by Vorarlberger Nachrichten, conducted by Erich Ortner.
- 17. March 2006: Invited talk on the Intelligent Go Board project (see Projects), by the Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation of the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration (WU Wien).
- 08. March 2004: Invited talk on AI in industrial applications. Invitation by Eberle Automatische Systeme GmbH, Dornbirn, Vorarlberg. There was also an interview by Vorarlberger Nachrichten, conducted by Thomas Matt.
- 22. Oct 2001: Invited talk on Computer Go and Ensembles at the Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany. Invitation by Prof. Dr. Ingo Althöfer
- Program committee member of Session Spam at the Sicherheit 2008 conference in Saarbrücken, Germany.
- Since 2007: Collaboration with Prof. Thomas E. Johnson from the University of Colorado at Boulder in the area of biological image analysis.
- Program committee member of the KDLL 2006 workshop on Knowledge Discovery in Life Science Literature, Singapore.
- 19.-26.2.2004: Collaboration with Prof. Dr. Werner Dubitzky, School of Biomedical Sciences, University of Ulster, United Kingdom (Northern Ireland). Supported by EU COST 282 as Short Term Mission.
- 29.7.-5.8.2001: Collaboration with Prof. Dr. Saso Dzeroski and colleagues of the Dept. of Intelligent Systems, Jozef Stefan Institute, Llubljana, Slovenia.
I have also been a reviewer for several international journals, including Applied Artificial Intelligence, Cybernetics and Systems, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, and the Bioinformatics Journal, plus countless conferences and workshops.
This includes part of my work prior to the founding of my company, Seewald
Solutions. Current work is stated in References (sorry, only available in German).
- Apr 2007: Developing a continuous price tracking system for competitors in a large Austria best-price search platform (Radio Krejcik KG, Vienna)
- 2002: Initial and continuous data transfer from old computer system into a current DKS accounting system (Tarbuk AG, Vienna)
- 2001: Initial and continuous data transfer from XQuattro host system into a current DKS accounting system (Autoitalia Salzburg HandelsgmbH, Salzburg)
- 2001: Regular transfer and backup of distributed accounting data via ISDN (Prof. Dr. Günther Wiesinger Zentralverwaltung, Vienna)
- 1999: Initial data transfer from Customized Wizard host system (Oracle 7.0 database) into a client-server system (order by Kabelsignal AG, Maria Enzersdorf via IBS E.Böhm KEG, Vienna). Around half a gigabyte of data from more than 150 tables was extracted and transformed into a new format specified by the client.
All my numerous professional projects were finished on time and in budget, dating back to my very first project in 1992.
- June 2008: Prof. Dr. Werner Dilger Award for Best Paper at the Data Mining Cup, Leipzig, Germany, with a talk on the technical challenges for Machine Learning and Data Mining in the area
of predictive behavioral targeting.
- June 2002: Travel Scholarship for attending the prestigious International Conference on Machine Learning 2002 (ICML-2002) in Sydney, Australia; including paper presentation (see Publications)
- 1996, 1997, 1998: Leistungsstipendium der Technisch-Naturwissenschaftlichen Fakultät (yearly stipend for excellent performance as student granted by the faculty for technical and natural sciences of Vienna University of Technology)
- 1994: White rose from the Bundesrealgymnasium Schmelz for excellent performance during secondary school
- May 1992: Participation in the 23. Österreichische Mathematik-Olympiade, Gebietswettbewerb für Fortgeschrittene (competition focussing on creative solutions to mathematical problems)
- May 1991: EDV-Jugendpreis der Stadt Wien (award for innovative computer programs written by students in secondary school, granted by the city of Vienna)
