Publications and OpenStreetMap

The main areas where I am active and which I believe to be potentially interesting to others are my professional career as Researcher and Developer in the Machine Learning domain, and the OpenStreetMap project. This site collects results and information mainly from these two fields. If you have questions or comments about them or this site, I will be happy about your message!

My profession as Data Scientist and Machine Learning expert began in the 90s during my graduate study at Technical University Berlin, in the Neural Information Processing group of Prof. Klaus Obermayer. There, I completed my Diploma with a thesis on Blind Source Separation of Optical Imaging data (extracting neuronal activation patterns in the Visual Cortex), and in 2004 my PhD with the thesis “Working with real-world datasets : preprocessing and prediction with large incomplete and heterogeneous datasets”. In between, a Fulbright scholarship allowed me a stay and study in the United States, at the University of Boulder, Colorado.

After my PhD, I was working for 10 years as Researcher, Developer, Project Manager, and Research Team Leader in the Data Analysis group at the Software Competence Center Hagenberg GmbH close to Linz in Austria. My research interests there were in the areas of Transfer Learning, interpretability of models, and parallelization.

Since 2015, I am researching in and applying interpretable data-driven models in technical applications of Machine Learning in Corporate Technology (CT) at Siemens AG in Munich.

In 2007, I became aware of the OpenStreetMap project, at a time, when most of Austria had only been mapped down to the level of motorways and primaries. As I have had a special interest in maps for as long as I can remember, I quickly got involved in mapping (using hiking, biking, GPS, and aerial imagery). After just a year, OpenStreetMap tools, data in my region, and my knowledge hat evolved enough to start creating a hiking map for my then home village of Gutau in the Mühlviertel, Upper Austria. The data was completed together with other volunteers, I designed a map style, and prepared and completed a print of that map, in early 2009, with a remake including bike routes in 2013. Since then I have continued to work on map rendering privately, and have sometimes been active as an avocational map designer for some clients in my own company.

-- Holger Schöner