I have contributed to various free software projects, and have also written a few (mostly small) programs of my own.
The software I've written during my PhD project is called Trainable Information Extractor, or TIE for short: a statistical system that supports not just information extraction, but also text classification and some related tasks such as preprocessing and XML merging and repair.
It's written in Java and available under GPL. But be warned that this is experimented software. It worked very fine for my purposes, but it's hardly ready for general use, due to lack of sufficient user documentation, convenient user interfaces etc. Sorry – you know how it is.
And then there's NL Stego (Java, GPL), a system for text generation and text-based steganography. You can train it with sample texts (Kant, for example) and then it will generate random pseudo-texts than might lack meaning and grammatical perfectness but still convey some clear resemblance to the trained texts. Hidden in this pseudo-texts you can embed your secret messages. That's called steganography. Usually, steganography is about hiding texts in images or other binary files, but hiding texts in other texts takes less space and is more entertaining.
The program has mainly be done as a case study. It works quite well but usually there are probably better ways to hide secret messages. Anyway, it can be fun, even it you just want to generate some text without having any secret messages to hide in it (ever needed to finish a paper by midnight? ;-) ).
For the GNU Project, I have translated various texts by Richard Stallman and others into German:
I also work as a paid software engineer developing commercial – and thus mainly proprietary – software.
In 2000/2001, I worked for WorldOS in Brooklyn, New York; a small start-up founded by Lucas Gonze whose goal was to introduce trust and reputation management in peer-to-peer architectures. A very ambitious early approach that tackled many questions that are still largely open as of today. The software was to be released as free software, but the company died in the dot.com crash.
From 2001 to 2003 I worked as a software engineer and project leader for the German voice application provider Mundwerk, participating in and finally leading the development of one of the first voice application platforms in German language. In this context I also wrote my final thesis on "A Toolkit for Caching and Prefetching in the Context of Web Application Platforms" (2002). My system uses statistical methods to improve response times and thus user experience by predicting and asynchronously prefetching future page requests. It was successfully employed as part of the Mundwerk voice platform and is, to my knowledge, still quite unique as of today.
In October 2001 I became a Sun Certified Programmer for the Java 2 Platform.
From late 2006 to early 2008 I worked on an experimental Web project for Producto, the company best known for its German-language Testberichte website.
I also maintain a small Software Development Bibliography that lists some books and articles that I've found useful for software development.
There is more to freedom than just free software. Check out my free society page.
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