Profile
Dr. Sven Schmeier studied physics and computer science at Saarland University from 1989 to 1997 and graduated by receiving a Diplom (MSc) in computer science. His PhD-Thesis in Computational Linguistics is about “Exploratory Search on Mobile Devices”.
In 1998 he started working at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) as a researcher and software developer in several projects.
Sven was co-founder of the company XtraMind Technologies GmbH (now Sematell GmbH) in 2000 and was the head of the research department until 2005.
In 2005 he started as the head of the research lab at Semgine GmbH, reformed to medx GmbH and now ada in Berlin.
Since 2007 he is back at the DFKI as Chief Engineer leading several research and industrial projects in the area of Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning and Big Data.
Also in 2007 Sven founded the DFKI spin-off company Yocoy Technologies GmbH together with his colleagues Prof. Hans Uszkoreit and Dr. Feiyu Xu. Under his technical leadership as CTO more than 30 mobile applications as multilingual communication assistants for English, Chinese,French, German and Spanish speaking tourism markets, available for iOS and Android with users from more than 100 countries have been developed.
In 2017 Sven has been promoted to be the Associate Head of Language Technology Lab of DFKI consisting of more than 30 researchers, engineers and consultants at different levels.
In 2018 Sven co-founded the China-Germany based company Giance Technologies GmbH which is now part of unicepta
Skills
- Leading small to midsize groups of international experts in AI and Computer Science
- Creating products from scratch to successful market entry
- Leading research and industrial projects
- Acquisition and administration of industry projects
- Design and development of research concepts, innovative applications, and products
- (Co-) Supervision of master theses and teaching
- Technical management of start-up companies
- Consulting various companies in their early stages
Experience
Mar 2007 – present
Senior Consultant and Associate Head of Language Technology Lab at DFKI GmbH (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence) in Berlin:
Project leader in several research projects ([28],[16],[14],[13],[12],[11])
Acquiring several industrial and public funded research projects. ([24])
Research in different areas like Information Extraction, Knowledge Retrieval, Big Data and Machine Translation ([25], [21], [20], [18], [17], [15])
Member of the Berlin Big Data Center
Jun 2007 – present
Co-founder of the company Yocoy Technologies GmbH with Dr. Feiyu Xu and Prof. Hans Uszkoreit. Yocoy is producing apps for mobile devices that help to overcome language barriers, i.e. intelligent phrasebooks and city guides ([19]).
Oct 2005 – Sep 2007:
Senior Researcher at Semgine GmbH, now reformed to medx GmbH in Berlin. At Semgine we extracted medical information of Medline and Pubmed documents. My role in the team has been building up and directing the research lab. Furthermore research and development of industrial parsers for medical documents ([10]).
Mar 2005 – Mar 2007:
Freelancer: Consulting various companies in their early stages such as Rebel Creations AG, Xpertim GmbH, and Dr. Netter Consulting GmbH
Technological consulting companies in the area of document management, databases and e-commerce platforms, text&form GmbH, Pidas (Switzerland)
Dec 2000 – Mar 2005:
Co-founder of the company XtraMind Technologies GmbH in Saarbrücken – today it is the Sematell GmbH. The main product of the company was and still is an email response management system called MailMinder (today ReplyOne) based on my earlier research at DFKI (ICC project) of a special Machine Learning engine which has been further developed into an industrial product ([9]).
In 2004 the core system has been patented ([23]).
Mar 1998 – Dec 2000:
Researcher and software developer in several projects at DFKI GmbH in Saarbrücken. The two main projects have been COSMA (Cooperative Schedule Managament Agent), TIM (Telecom Information Management), and ICC (Innovation at the Call Center) ([8],[7],[6],[5],[4],[3]).
Academic
2021 + 2022
Visiting lecturer at the Steinbeis Hochschule, Faculty: Steinbeis School of International Business and Entrepreneurship SIBE: Big Data and Cloud Architectures, Data Science (5 CP), Intelligent Data Processes (5 CP)
2019/20
Lecturer at FOM teaching the master degree module Analysis of Semi- and Unstructured Data (38 hours)
2015 + 2017 + 2019 + 2020 + 2021 + 2022
Visiting lecturer at the DHBW Heilbronn teaching the master degree module Data Mining (52 hours) of the international computer science program.
2015 (Summer term)
Visiting lecturer at the H-DA (Hochschule Darmstadt) teaching the bachelor degree module Data Mining and Information Retrieval (70 hours).
2014 (Winter term)
- Visiting lecturer at the DHBW Stuttgart teaching the bachelor degree module Data Mining (40 hours).
- Visiting lecturer at the H-DA (Hochschule Darmstadt) teaching the bachelor degree module Data Mining and Information Retrieval (70 hours).
- Guest lecturer at the TU Berlin teaching Information Retrieval
- Guest lecturer at University of Saarland teaching Information Retrieval and Opinion Mining
2014 (Summer term)
Visiting lecturer at the DHBW Stuttgart teaching the bachelor degree module Data Warehouse (40 hours).
2013 (Winter term)
Visiting lecturer at the DHBW Stuttgart teaching the master degree module Data Mining (40 hours) of the international computer science program.
Dec 2013
Ph.D. Computational Linguistics. Thesis title: Exploratory Search On Mobile Devices, Institute for Computational Linguistics, University of Saarland [22]
The goal of my thesis was to provide a general framework (MobEx) for exploratory search beyond the document centered approaches. The central part was the design, implementation of several core modules for on-demand unsupervised information extraction. These core processing elements, combined with a multitouchable user interface specially designed for mobile devices have been finally implemented in a research prototype.
In several evaluations I was able to show that the developed ad-hoc interactive Query Disambiguation, Named Entity Recognition, and Relation Extraction components compare with current State-Of-The-Art supervised and semi-supervised approaches. Furthermore I analysed the prospects and limitations of the framework and the prototype in several user evaluations.
Sep 1997
Master’s Degree in Computer Science, Thesis title: PASHA II – A Personal Assistant for Scheduling Appointments
During my master thesis I implemented a Multi Agent System in which cooperating agents autonomously scheduled appointments on behalf of their users. The agents were connected to the Unix CM (Calendar Managment) system which was popular that time. The scheduling process was done completely by negotiation between these agents taking (underspecified) temporal and spatial constraints into account.
In the research project COSMA[4] the agents have been connected to a natural language dialogue system. With this users could communicate in natural language with the agents and schedule appointments without noticing whether they were communicating with individuals or agents.
Spoken Languages
Native German, Fluent English