About me

1 About me

1.1 Contact

Email	markus.mottl@gmail.com
PGP-key	pgp.asc

1.2 Biography

Nationality	Austrian
Profession	Computer Scientist
Languages	German (native), English (fluent),
	French (conversational), Czech (basic)

1.2.1 Education

Oct 2000 -

PhD-student in computer science (artificial intelligence) at the Vienna University of Technology. My supervisor is Gerhard Widmer.

Oct 1999 - Sep 2000

Graduated with distinction from the Division of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh as MSc in Artificial Intelligence.

During the MSc-course I specialized in the following subjects:

Formal Programming Language Semantics (Alex Simpson)
Applicative Programming and Specification (Don Sannella)
Automated Reasoning (Alan Bundy and Jacques Fleuriot)

The topic of my thesis (supervisor: Alan Smaill) was Automating Functional Program Transformation.

Oct 1993 - Sep 1999

1992 - 1993

Six months compulsory military service in the Austrian army.

1984 - 1992

BRG Steyr (Federal Science Higher School), nature science branch (special emphasis on physics, chemistry, biology and Latin). Graduated cum laude.

1.2.2 Professional

Oct 2004 -: Full-time quantitative researcher at Jane St. Capital, LLC, New York.
Apr 2004 - Oct 2004: Consultant for Jane St. Capital, LLC, an investment company in Manhattan. Mostly OCaml-related work.
Dec 2000 - Apr 2003: Research assistant in the Machine Learning Group of the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, working on the project A New Modular Architecture for Data Mining. The visible results of this work can be traced on my AIFAD-page.
Oct 1997 - Oct 1998: Worked full-time as one of two Unix systems administrators at the Department of Applied Computer Science at the Vienna University of Economics. My duties were mostly configuration and maintenance of the departmental servers and workstations (mainly Digital Unix on Digital Alphas and some Linux/Intel machines) and student computing facilities (all in all more than 50 machines and several hundred users) and user/student support.
Summer 1997: Worked as tutor in the student computing labs of the Department of Applied Computer Science at the Vienna University of Economics.

1.3 Research interests

My interest is in the field of formal (symbolic) methods in computer science and artificial intelligence (especially machine learning), and I currently try to find out how algebraic methods might help in specifying machine learning systems. Due to my interest in formal languages, I also spend quite some time studying modern programming languages, especially functional (e.g. OCaml, Haskell) and logic ones (e.g. Mercury and LambdaProlog).

1.4 Hobbies

1.4.1 Music

In 1996 I discovered that I actually like vocal music and decided to join a choir. In the years to follow I sang with a large variety of choirs in Vienna and am member of:

Wiener Singverein
Wiener Kammerchor

In addition I have taken lessons in classical song with Junko Fukunaga for about two years and am a happy owner of a Yamaha CLP-170 Digital Piano.

1.4.2 Sports

When time allows (about once a week) I train Aikido in the Viennese dojo Shumeikan.