Frag-Mutti.de ("Ask mom") is Germany's most popular website for housekeeping and cooking tips. It is visited more than 70,000 times a day and has a vibrant community. I started the project with my friend Hans-Jörg Brekle in 2003 and I developed and designed the website using PHP and MySQL. Since then, we have been
interviewed and featured numerous times on German television, radio and newspapers.
Frag-Vati.de ("Ask dad") was the logical extension of my successful first project. The website provides DIY and financial tips. Just like its sister website, the content is provided by the community.
You guessed it - here is the English version -
askmommy.org :-)
In my profession as a computer scientist at Simon Fraser University, I am in charge of the website of a research group called
Climate Change Impacts Reserach Consortium (CCIRC) which investigates secondary effects of climate change on human health and ecosystems. While the well-thought-out layout was designed by
thatblue, I used and customized
Drupal, a powerful CMS, to provide the website's functionality.
Our first Onlineshop:
My Little Mousie offers high-quality baby and kids toys designed in Germany by sigikid.
As part of my Master's thesis at Simon Fraser University I implemented a highly optimized system for Computed Tomography (CT) and volume rendering. This system lets you compute a 3D volume from 2D images acquired from the
outside enabling you to look at the
inside of an object. The program is written in C++ and GLSL. It makes use of a special storage scheme to increase accuracy while maintaining interactive frame rates by employing the GPU. I point the interested reader to my
publications.
This is a CT scan of a carp. The system allows you to look at the inside. Here, the fish's bones are made visible while the outer tissue is transparent. Generally, any set of 2D images suited for CT (e.g. MRI, X-Ray, OPT) or a 3D volume can serve as input to the system. Applications vary widely and are mostly found in medical or biological imaging.
Making sense of
abstract data (some call it
information visualization) is a difficult task. In many fields professionals deal with high-dimensional data. In its "simplest" form, think of a spreadsheet with many (e.g. millions) rows and dozens or hundreds of columns. How do you find something interesting in there
fast? I might know the answer. Special tools such as
Tableau or machine learning algorithms help me on my quest to (your) wisdom :-) In this example, a table created within minutes in Tableau gives fishery management an easy overview of possible outcomes of different fishing scenarios. A result which was otherwise obtained during sleepless nights using an ordinary spreadsheet application.
Other tools such as Matlab or R allow me to digg deeper into your data: Signal processing, image processing, statistical analysis... Here, I used Fourier analysis to find patterns of interest.
During my undergrad studies at University of Ulm, I developed a high-efficiency "
ray tracer" which creates and renders nature scenes. All models, the landscape and textures were generated procedurally (e.g. with L-systems and Perlin noise). This image shows intermediate results. The complete scene consists of more than 50 million triangles which translates to 1.7GB of geometry information.
To dramatically reduce memory consumption the trees, flowers and bushes can be modelled once and only their positions in the scene have to be stored. This results in a huge performance gain.
Simulating inverted light paths (hence: ray tracing) using
Monte Carlo methods and
quasi-Monte Carlo methods results in an image like this: The light is simulated correctly and the image comes dangerously close to a photo.
In 2006, we turned our successful website www.frag-mutti.de into a successful book. With over 90,000 copies sold so far and translated into Polish, it is something I am very proud of.
The book is called "Frag Mutti" ("Ask mom"), it took us about nine months to write it and was published by Fischer Taschenbuchverlag. We provide a
reading sample for the interested (German) reader.
Following the success of our first book, we published "Frag Vati" ("Ask dad") and "Frag Mutti das Sparbuch" ("Ask mom the savings book") in 2007 and 2008.
During my 18 months at Simon Fraser University towards my Master's, I published two scientific papers. Please have a look at my
publications.
My hobby: nature and wildlife photography. Eagle, Barnet Marine Park, Burnaby, BC, Canada
Burnaby downtown as viewed from my old apartment.
Owl, Port Coquitlam, BC, Canada
Maligne Lake, Jasper National Park, AB, Canada
Pigeon, Queen Elizabeth Park, Vancouver, BC, Canada
Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, CA, United States
Plant in a garden.
Seal, Vancouver Aquarium, Stanley Park, Vancouver, BC, Canada
Flowers, Port Coquitlam, BC, Canada
What I've done
